Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  “We’re going to have to induce you.”

  “Induce me? I’m only at twenty-six weeks. The baby will be too small.” I saw a slug of a baby, hooked up to wires and tubes, in a huge plastic incubator. “It’s too soon.” So, there is something to save, I thought. I allowed some relief to creep in.

  Dr. Sloan still held the wand midair. “There’s no heartbeat.” She left a space between each word. “The baby has passed. I’m sorry.”

  “Impossible,” Wei protested. “The baby was fine yesterday.”

  “No, it’s gone,” I said. My gaze tracked back up to the ceiling toward the inspirational posters, then drifted across the expanse of pocked asbestos tiles. “She’s right. The baby is gone.”

  —

  I found there are memories too painful to recall in detail, so my mind slides over them: the cramps unlike the contractions I’d had with Emily and Stephanie, labor without pain, the eerie silence of waiting for a wail that never comes. He. A boy. How the nurses still suctioned the liquid from his nose even though he didn’t breathe.

  They wanted to take him away—my son—like he was medical waste. Though it was not protocol, the doctor relented to Wei’s forceful pleading that we be given time with him; Wei’s face was warped with pain and anger, and no one would have dared to say no. The nurse wiped our son down, wrapped him in a blanket, and slipped a small cap on his head. He was small enough to be cradled in two hands, but I held him in the crook of my arm.

  He had eyelashes.

  If his eyes had opened, what would they look like? Amphibian, glossy and black? Or some milky-gray not-quite color? In a chair pulled up against the side of the bed, Wei hunched with his elbows on his knees.

  “We have to give him a name,” I said.

  “No,” Wei said.

  “Then how will we refer to him? The Baby? Will we never talk about him? He needs a name.”

  I understood Wei’s reluctance, how naming him would make this real instead of some bad experience we could push aside.

  We had discussed names over the last few months but had settled on none. I wanted to name him for the other recent loss in our life. Not Jia Bao exactly, but something that would resonate with it. The two characters of Jia Bao’s name meant “family” and “treasured,” or “precious.” I thought of an uncommon character, more formal, that echoed the meaning of the second character: Yu. A character that combined the gold and jade radicals.

  I suggested it to Wei.

  “Just one character?” he said.

  “Yes, like your name. One character. Simple. Yu.”

  I could see in his eyes the baby taking on this name, this history. No longer nameless, our son was Yu. I could see what he might have been. I could see already how he would have Wei’s nose, but my chin. I imagined him fighting with his sisters. I imagined him at five years old, wedged between them—Emily already a teenager and Stephanie close—posed in front of our door for a first-day-of-school photo. Wei was right to be afraid: naming him had turned him into a real person.

  I began to unwrap his blanket. Wei asked what I was doing, turned away and said he didn’t want to see.

  “I want to remember just his face,” he said.

  But, allowed only one encounter, I wanted to commit our son’s entire being to memory. Despite himself, Wei looked too as I inspected his tiny fingernails. His body was covered in black downy hair, and a blue “Mongolian spot” spread across his lower back and butt. Emily and Stephanie had been born with this birthmark too; it had faded by the time they started school. I was gentle with his limp body. The creases at his wrists and elbows and ankles indicated where he would have grown plump once he started breast-feeding.

  The nurse returned after an hour. I could not give him up. I wanted one more hour, and then another. Carefully, I swaddled him again. I pressed my nose to him and smelled him. He smelled of my blood. I handed him over, and then Wei held my hand and we both cried.

  —

  Our son’s death was something we couldn’t come back from. Wei stopped apologizing at random moments for what had happened with Helen. He stopped his flirtatious pleas for my affection. We were both somber.

  I realized that this was what Mama had meant by love. A shared experience, a shared history, a shared trauma: this is what made us a family. No one else could understand it. I knew that for as long as Wei and I were married, even if my head was turned by another, the other man and I would not share this one critical thing—this one summer—and that would be enough to unmake any potential love affair. I thought of all the moments growing up when I had disliked my family—my resentment of my father, my disgust at my mother, my anger at my siblings. Of all the families in the world, why was I born into this family? I’d thought. As if just dumb fate had brought us together. Now I understood there was something stronger than fate. Choice. It was ugly and quotidian and lacked romance, and that was exactly what gave it its strength.

  So, like my mother, I chose to stay.

  2003

  54

  EXCEPT FOR A FEW random reading lights, the plane was dark and mostly empty. The flight attendants, dressed in lavender, murmured in the galley. Occasionally, a flipped magazine page rustled. I rose and paced the aisle to soothe my swollen legs. On a more crowded plane, this would have brought anxious glances and a request to stay seated, seat belt fastened, but this hollow dark body was a respite from the chaos below and no one stirred beneath their thin microfleece blankets.

  A few old men gathered in the small vestibule near the emergency exit. They swung their arms and stretched, and smelled of sleep and body odor. They nodded and acknowledged me with grunts. In another world, tanks were rolling into Baghdad. We didn’t talk about the invasion or the epidemic. The roar of the jet was peace.

  When I returned to my seat, the woman across the aisle had awoken. She fanned herself with the laminated emergency landing instructions.

  “What bad luck, right? Descending right into hell.”

  I hoped my smile would deter her. My throat was sore and dry and I didn’t want to talk. I buttoned my sweater, pulled up the blanket, and closed the air vent.

  “Did you hear about the old man who came back from China with the disease? I mean the doctors don’t know if it’s bird flu or swine flu or god-knows-what flu.”

  “They are calling it SARS,” I said. “It’s not that bad. They say it’s like pneumonia. If you’re healthy, you should be fine.” Instinctively, I knocked on the armrest as if it were wood. We moved against the exodus; the US State Department had issued a travel warning to Taiwan, and nonessential expats were encouraged to leave. Some mysterious illness with flu-like symptoms—a quick death, the new Spanish flu—was speeding through Asia. Whole buildings, thirty stories high, were cordoned off in Hong Kong and their residents bused to recreation centers to wait out their quarantine. Feverish salesgirls led to department stores shut down for disinfection. Panicked American newspapers blamed the dirty Chinese and their markets of rusty cages and crying birds, of civet cats mewing before slaughter, of strange culinary tastes and unwashed hands. In my own suitcase, I carried a box of surgical masks.

  Wei had been worried about my trip. We no longer had to fear the government—martial law had ended in 1987, and the country was now under the administration of the first non-KMT president. In the end, on the issue of democracy, Wei’s side had won. Taiwan had full enfranchisement and freedom of speech. Now, it could focus on the kind of contemporary concerns brought on by freedom, like global epidemics.

  “Just wait and see how your mother does,” he had said after my sister’s call. “It might be a false alarm. Do you really want to throw yourself into that situation? Even the State Department is advising against it.”

  “She’s ninety years old,” I had insisted. “There are no more false alarms. I have to go home. She’s my mother.”

  “It’s bad.” The woman drew out the word. “I wouldn’t have come if I could have avoided it. Wouldn’t you have canceled a w
edding? What kind of bad luck start is that?” She grabbed a water bottle from the seat pocket and unscrewed it. The plastic crackled in her fist as she gulped.

  “I’m sure we’ll be fine. The news exaggerates everything.”

  With the back of her hand, she wiped her mouth. “Oh god, I hope so.”

  We landed in Taoyuan just past dawn. The plane emptied quickly, and we trudged in a haphazard line over an antibacterial rug, then past a temperature scanner. My body appeared on-screen in a rainbow aura, technology illuminating my chakras: red at my core and a milder orange radiating outward to yellow, an indicator of health.

  The airport hallways were lined with photos of a Taiwan as Portuguese sailors might have seen it more than four hundred years before: emerald isle and azure sea, marble gorges and tattooed, nubile native women in woven dress. Sprinkled among these were posters advertising an exhibit for bodies preserved with plastic in various athletic poses. I’d heard a rumor that all the cadavers came from unclaimed Chinese prisoners, and I had to turn away from the face, stripped of flesh to red-and-white muscle, that grinned at me from behind glass.

  I stood in the line for US citizens, my blue passport in hand, once again aware of the strangeness of returning to my country as the citizen of another. The customs official, a man in his thirties with a trim haircut and angry eyes, looked me up and down and asked if I’d had a fever in the last two weeks. Had I been to a farm or near livestock? Where in Taiwan would I be staying? When I answered in Mandarin, he seemed even angrier, as if I were an outsider pretending to be one of them. The slam of his stamp on my passport sounded like a gavel. He waved me through.

  Beyond the frosted glass doors that separated transit from arrivals, I found the bus counter and bought a ticket to Taipei on the Flying Dog line, which sounded like a knockoff of Greyhound. All the buses into the city were two-story mammoths with padded reclining pilot chairs, personalized video screens, and speakers embedded in the headrests. The air outside was startling, thick and hot, but the driver, with a surgical mask hanging by its elastic strap from one of his ears, refused to turn on the air-conditioning, claiming it increased the risk of infection. I pulled open a window. On the freeway it made no difference; we moved so slowly that the heavy air merely mingled with the congested smog on the road.

  —

  Again, the island had changed in its constant cycle of creation and destruction, but a few old monuments still stood like stolid warriors among the streaking traffic: North Gate, the train station, the temples. Around them, new condo high-rises, new karaoke parlors, new cram schools, new restaurants and cafés: a hundred thousand earnest entrepreneurs who’d have a new venture by the time I next visited.

  I was unfamiliar with Taipei, so I disembarked at the railway station and flagged down one of the hundreds of yellow taxis that seemed to be hungrily trolling the place. A mask obscured half the driver’s face, and he gazed at me warily before he hopped out and helped with my luggage.

  “You gotta be careful,” he said as he heaved my suitcases into the trunk. “One sick person and—wah—it’s over.” His cautiousness was the typical mood of the city, but he made this declaration with a light tone and I assumed he was smiling beneath his mask. His black hair flopped over his forehead. I had no idea how old he was. Maybe forty? Or a robust fifty-five? His toes peeked out from velcroed sandals—a generic version of the hiking sandals that were the rage in Berkeley—but they betrayed nothing except an ingrown nail on his left foot.

  A carved wooden goddess hung on beads from his rearview mirror. He rubbed her with a rough thumb and said, “Most Americans are leaving, not coming. Maybe it’s a good time for a vacation. You must have something important to come for. Business?” I let him continue his speculation without responding, and after a brief monologue, we arrived at the entrance to Ah Zhay’s alley. He claimed his car would not make it through, so he unloaded my bags there.

  “I’m not really scared,” he said as I handed him cash. “It’s just a flu. I change this mask every day. But you be careful. You’ve been away awhile, I can tell.” I smiled at his concern and thanked him, then dragged my bags down the alley.

  Ah Zhay and her husband had lived in the veterans village in Taichung until moss grew on the mounded roof tiles and weather had cracked the window frames of the decrepit plaster house. They never repaired the flaking walls because they always intended to move. The government had promised to relocate them into a new high-rise; they just had to wait for the slow, rusty bureaucratic wheels to creak into movement. The letter would come any day, Jie-fu claimed. Their endless waiting took on the feel of a magical realist story: my brother-in-law’s insistence that the letter would arrive before they died was almost comical. However, the government’s patience outlasted my sister’s. When they left, the land for the new development finally had been cleared—an open-air market was bulldozed and the vendors resurrected their tables among the rubble until a fence was erected around the site.

  Ah Zhay decided she wanted to move to Taipei where Mei Mei lived. My parents, at the time nearing their nineties, and dependent on my sister, had no choice but to move as well. Now, on quiet Lishui Street, behind the Normal University where my niece worked in the library, they lived in a three-bedroom apartment in a modest building clad in gray tiles. The small sunporch, where they kept the washing machine, looked over an empty lot. They had come to Taipei with only suitcases and bought everything new: a pretty green refrigerator and a Sanyo washing machine, cheap imitation Scandinavian-style furniture in blond wood veneer, bedding from Ikea. After forty years in a house, the only things of value they had that were worth moving were their clothes.

  —

  I rang the intercom and Ah Zhay exclaimed when she heard my voice. The building door buzzed as it unlocked. I yanked it open. I heard the apartment door on the third floor scream open and the shuffling slap of slippers hurrying down the stairs. I had just dragged my suitcase through the door when Ah Zhay met me.

  “Little sister!” Her hot hand squeezed my arm. “You never change. How was your flight?”

  Ah Zhay was in her midsixties. She looked entirely like the sister I’d always known, and yet I was not sure I would recognize her if I passed her in the street. Her figure had thickened and her hair was chopped short. Extra weight cushioned her features. She must have looked at me with the same wonder at the passage of time.

  “Pretty empty, but smooth,” I answered.

  Her smile faltered and she frowned. “I’m sorry you had to come home now. I wish…” She sighed. “Never mind. Come, let me help you.” She grabbed the top handle of my suitcase and lugged it up the first step, where she paused and gathered momentum for the next stair.

  “Ah Zhay, let me!” I tried to take it from her but she elbowed me.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  She made it up one flight before yanking her hand off the strap and laughing. “Okay.” She exhaled and dabbed the sweat off her forehead. “You’re younger than me. It’s all yours.”

  —

  “How is she?” I asked Ah Zhay as we sat before my open suitcase. I’d brought an assortment of vitamins and supplements, as well as some expensive antiaging lotions for Ah Zhay. We were in Baba’s room. His smell clung to the walls: menthol oil and nicotine and a particularly pungent aftershave that I was sure only men of his generation wore. The next room was my mother’s: a narrow single bed, a desk piled with sketch pads. Now, at the end of her life, she had finally returned to her original passion, art. She drew street scenes—vendors squatting next to crates, people strolling under trees. Every drawing, I noticed, had one subtly positioned out-of-place figure: a woman at a desk under the shadow of trees, a child building a tower of blocks in the middle of the sidewalk, a man washing his dog next to the entrance to a store. I wondered what it revealed about my mother.

  “I’m tired,” Ah Zhay said. Her blue cotton shirt crept over her belly, exposing a wedge of skin. The flower appliqué on her shoulder was coming unstitc
hed and two of the petals curled up sadly.

  I was afraid to ask for details.

  “You’ll see yourself,” she said to my silence.

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Nothing more than I told you.”

  Certain questions can’t be asked. Was this a long demise, or an acute illness that would strike quickly? Had I returned for Mama’s last moments of coherence, or for the real good-bye? Hope springs eternal—a truism for jilted lovers and for the children of dying parents. We convince ourselves the inevitable isn’t, and when it is upon us, we rail and plead. Or deny. Busy with preparation and travel, I had pushed away my worry; now that I was here, at midmorning in Taipei, when less than a day before I’d been in the chilly Bay Area, my new reality struck me.

  I tore open the box of masks I’d brought. This box was precious, almost contraband. Recently, a woman had been arrested for falsely advertising cheap masks as the coveted N95 respirator, which were in short supply at the moment. Her online selling handle had been “squirellygirl,” and now headlines were emblazoned with the evil deeds of squirellygirl, and outraged letters to the editor complained about the decay of morals in the younger generation. Even the police were looking for her. She had become the vessel for every fear sweeping the country.

  “Thank you. Did you wear this on the airport bus?” Ah Zhay asked.

  I shook my head.

  “You should have.” She took one from me and slipped it on. Her tired eyes and the mask’s strange white muzzle and exhalation valve transformed her into an alien.

  —

  The hospital had multiple buildings: one, in red brick with white trim, had been built during the Japanese colonial era, and the other was a more modern cement high-rise. A walkway connected the two. The hospital was near New Park, which was now called 2-28 Peace Park in commemoration of the March Massacre, which itself had been renamed the “February 28 Incident,” as if the weeks of disappearances could be narrowed down to only the episode with the cigarette vendor.