I washed his shirt in the bathroom, and when I came out, I found him at the window in his undershirt, his bare shoulder pressed to the glass: this short, thin, old stranger whose body my father—enigmatic, overwhelming, fearsome—somehow occupied.
The compassion that I suddenly felt for him surprised me. I joined him at the window, trying to understand what he saw. Buildings, the haphazard jumble that betrayed the city’s turbulent history, obscured the horizon, but I imagined I saw the curve of the earth, a smash of life gradually thinning out at the edges, sprinkled into the dark green hills, empty to the sea, an island, shaped like a yam, or perhaps a leaf of tobacco, with a black spine of dark mountains and knobby strings of twinkling lights cascading down the edges.
“I feel like I have been thinking about death my whole life,” Baba said.
I didn’t know what to say.
“I thought your mother would live forever. She was always going to outlive me.” His eyes, blue with age, sparkled in the sun’s glare.
I tried to think beyond my own meager personal memories to something more primal. A planet amid deep black space, still cooling from whatever blast or collision or universal hand that has created it. This planet is not just a lump of dumb rock. It is alive; it moves, shakes, slides. Two plates collide. Four million years ago, two plates collide and an island erupts. This island. Our lives were so minuscule in comparison.
58
THE WORLD DOES NOT HAPPEN the way we lay it out on paper: one event after another, one word following the next like a trail of ants. The rocks in the field do not preclude the flowing river fifty miles away; a man sneezes and at the exact same time a woman washes her feet, a child trips and blood oozes from the broken skin, a dog nips at a flea on its hindquarter, and a bird swallows a beetle. Past, present, and future too swirl together, distinguishable but not delineated by any sort of grammar beyond the one our hearts impose.
I want to believe that my parents found a way to bypass time that night, to compress and expand their lives together, to live out their whole lives again in their good-bye.
—
The shades were drawn. His daughter had fallen asleep, but he didn’t want to wake her. This moment was for the two of them: he and his wife.
This was the night, the moment. She was already halfway there, dragged down by morphine, which was the boatman of her voyage tonight. He brushed hair off her forehead. If their places were switched, he knew, she would be praying for him right now. Though the gods changed, she had always prayed for him. He had no prayer, believing only one thing from the thousands of Christian words she had said to him: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
This night felt so broad, broader than the years that had preceded it. He wondered how the decades condensed like this, disappearing into a blink, while one moment unfurled almost endlessly.
How quickly it all had passed.
—
That year, the cherry trees on Grass Mountain bloom in late February.
He sits on a blanket beneath a tree that is thick with flowers. The girl sitting beside him bats away a petal falling slowly toward her. Five of them are arrayed here sharing snacks and cups of cold sake: he; his sister, who has asked him as a pretense for inviting his friend Su Ming Guo, of whom she is fond; her classmate; and her classmate’s cousin. This girl, the classmate’s cousin, who has just caught him watching her, has blushing white skin the same color as the drifting petal. Her name is Jeng Li Min. He tries to return his attention to admiring the sakura, but his eyes keep being drawn to her creamy throat and the darkness of her hair against her skin.
Mono no aware. The bittersweet of transience. He tries to concentrate on this feeling. They come here not for mere beauty, but to think of the brief, brilliant flash of their own mortality reflected by the sakura. But he is a doctor, not a poet.
She, however, is a painter. He wants to ask her what she sees when she looks at the trees, if she sees them like he does. But amid the chatter of the picnickers around them, the question seems too earnest.
“I skinned my knee here,” his sister cries, and pulls up her skirt to reveal a light brown scar etched on her skin. He cringes at her blatant attempt to charm his friend and his friend’s indifference, though Ming Guo dutifully rolls up a sleeve to display a puckered line on his elbow.
“And you, Li Min? Any scars?” his sister asks.
Li Min blushes, but her expression doesn’t change. He’s curious about what she will say. Will she play the game or demur?
She tilts her head up and touches a finger to the underside of her chin. “A dog nipped me once, when I was three.”
His sister leans forward to inspect, then calls him over. “I can’t tell if it’s a scar or a birthmark. Dr. Tsai, you look.”
“Why would she lie?” he says.
“You’re the doctor. Look. It looks like a birthmark to me.”
He sighs, takes off his glasses and wipes them with his handkerchief.
“He’s very serious,” his sister’s classmate says, and giggles.
“Always,” his sister says.
He puts his glasses back on and leans forward. His sister gives him a mischievous smile as she moves out of the way.
This close he can smell Li Min’s hair, sweet with artificial roses. She holds herself very still. Right below the scar, her skin pulses.
“What kind of dog was it?” he asks.
“A street dog.”
“Ah, my brother’s bedside manner in action,” his sister says.
He leans back. “Definitely a scar.” This jagged scar against her pale throat fills him with the sort of clenched awareness that the sakura is meant to elicit. He swallows heavily and his eyes grow moist. He chides himself for this sentimentality. “Who’s next?” he says.
His sister claps her hands. “Now he plays.”
—
The sky is perfectly blue. In two days, it will be March. Because of a light breeze, the usual sulfur smell of this mountain is faint. His sister and her classmate have escorted Ming Guo to walk among the trees. He swore he saw his sister wink at Li Min as she left.
He knows his value. He is a doctor. Staring into the mirror as he shaves, he has moments of objective observance, noting that a passing stranger would likely consider him attractive. Yet, sitting on this blanket beside this girl, empty cups and crumpled paper between them, he feels that he has nothing to offer her.
“Look at how the flowers crowd together,” she says.
His gaze follows hers. On each gnarled branch, blooms cluster in bouquets. This is something he has both known and never noticed. He sees how the filaments burst like fireworks from the centers. Of course, these parts have names, but he cannot recall them.
“To the distant observer / They are chatting of the blossoms / Yet in spite of appearances / Deep in their hearts / They are thinking very different thoughts,” she says. Her forthrightness startles him. Her eyes have not left the blue sky or pale flowers. “A poem,” she says. “Ki no Tsurayuki.”
“Did you study poetry as well?” His words come out too fast.
She laughs. “I couldn’t study painting without studying poetry. Words and images are inextricable.”
He admits this is true.
“However, I mainly studied Western painting. Only pictures. No words.”
“Why?”
She looks at him. Her eyes are so dark that the reflection of the sky has completely obscured their original color. “For the same reason you studied Western medicine.”
He considers this.
“I’m not sure you are right,” he says finally.
She smiles. “Then why?”
“I think you expect I will say that Western is modern, and that our culture is old-fashioned. But I don’t believe that. I don’t believe the West equals modernity. The idea is colonialist.”
She glances at the Japanese family beneath the tree next to them and hushes him. He switches to Taiwanese. “We are curious creatures, we Taiw
anese. Orphans. Eventually, orphans must choose their own names and write their own stories. The beauty of orphanhood is the blank slate.”
These words are blasphemy. He is sorry as soon as he is finished. Only a man as clumsy as himself would express such sentiments on such a beautiful day beneath such a beautiful sky. He notices that she has been fiddling with the hem of her skirt. He wants to tell her how she has struck him. On a day with a sky so blue and air so crisp, how can he be held accountable for what comes from his mouth?
“I understand,” she says, and then she quotes Du Fu: “The country is broken, but the mountains and rivers remain.” Her eyes flash; he catches sight of the fire in this modest woman.
“We are the mountains and rivers,” he says, impressed. “No matter what the country is called.”
“Dr. Tsai!” his sister calls. Her arm is looped through Ming Guo’s and they march toward him. Her face is lost in the shadow beneath her hat.
Li Min glances at him and smiles. “Back to flowers and wine,” she says.
59
A LONG, SHRILL TONE startled me awake. Baba held Mama’s hand, his head tipped and his eyes closed as if he didn’t hear it.
“Oh no!” I exclaimed. I stumbled out of the chair. “Baba, call the nurse!” My finger jammed at the call button, but the nurses were already bursting through the door.
They swarmed my mother, checking wires and tubes and punching buttons on the machine, and a moment later, the doctor entered.
I paced around the periphery, moving from one side of the bed to the other. “Is she okay?” I asked, hoping the answer would surprise me. “Is it a malfunction? Is she okay?” My voice grew tighter at every iteration of the question. “She’s okay, right?”
The doctor called out the time to a nurse, who jotted it down.
“I’m afraid she’s passed,” he said.
I pushed past him and my hands shook as I wrenched my mother’s hand free of the stupid mitt. “Mama,” I said. “It’s me. Come on.”
The doctor gently touched my arm. “She’s gone. Would you give us a moment to clean up, and then you can say good-bye?”
I reluctantly let go and went to the other side of the bed. Baba still had not opened his eyes. I kneeled in front of him and spoke to him in Taiwanese. “Baba, they need a moment. We can come back, they said.”
I cried as I pulled his hand from hers and helped him to his feet. We left the nurses bustling around the bed and I guided Baba toward the empty waiting area. My hands shook. I walked too fast and I had to remind myself to slow down to his pace. The TV played on mute. I helped Baba into one of the hard plastic chairs and sat beside him. He still had not said a word.
“Baba,” I whispered through my sobs, “you don’t have to be strong for me.” I needed to see him cry too.
A torrent of platitudes spewed from my mouth: She’s at peace now; it’s in God’s hands now; she’s with Jesus now, Baba.
“Daughter, please stop talking,” Baba finally said. His shoulders slumped and he covered his face.
Hurt, I said, “I should call Ah Zhay and Dua Hyan. I’m going to find a phone.”
When I stood, I was disoriented. I saw the nurses’ station, brightly lit, behind us, but I couldn’t remember where Mama’s room had been. I caught sight of the bathroom sign, so I pushed open the heavy door and vomited into the sink.
I sank onto the mottled tile floor and wailed.
What would Baba do without her? Maybe the doctor had made a mistake. I would ask him to check again. Newspapers were full of stories of people who had been thought dead until the moment that they shifted or groaned during their own funerals. Doctors were not always right, I thought bitterly.
Drained, I held on to the lip of the sink and pulled myself up. In the bathroom’s greenish light, the mauve stall doors as my backdrop, my face looked terrible: red, blotchy, my lips and nose swollen. I splashed water on my face and wiped it with my shirt.
In the hallway again, I stopped a nurse and asked if the phones were working. Above her blank mask, her brow furrowed.
“Not yet,” she said, and this nudge of frustration was enough to make me cry again.
I found my way back to my mother’s room. The nurses had put down fresh sheets and carefully folded back the edge beneath Mama’s arms. They had removed all the machines and wires, turned off the overhead light and left only the soft yellow bedside lamp on, switched on a fan, and spritzed the room with a menthol freshener. Baba was back in the bedside chair, Mama’s hand clasped in his. I thought I heard the susurration of prayer.
Baba lifted his head. More than grief—defeat—showed itself in every part of his face: his bloodshot eyes, furrowed brow, and pursed mouth. “Did you call your sister and brother?”
I shook my head.
I went to the other side of the bed and pressed my palm to my mother’s smooth gray forehead. Her serene face revealed what a violence her illness had been. I kissed her eerily cool skin.
Because of the quarantine, my siblings could not come into the hospital, so I said good-bye for all of us, her children.
60
WE STUMBLED OUT of the hospital blinking into the sun and the glare of camera lights. Police guided us down the path. The quarantine had ended the way it had started—with a three-tone ring and a restrained announcement: “Guests, the quarantine has now ended. You are free to leave the building.”
Earnest reporters still clad in surgical masks greeted us, shouting questions and thrusting microphones over the plastic cordon. Baba and I walked together, his arm in mine. Mama’s body lay in the hospital morgue, waiting for the funeral. We hobbled past a woman who was repeatedly asking an official from the Ministry of Health if he was sure that we were not contagious.
We moved slowly past the barricades. A man in a bright purple tie shoved a microphone in our faces and called Baba “Grandpa” and me “Aunty,” as if this false intimacy could mask his hunger.
“Grandpa, Aunty, were you afraid? How did you pass the time? Was your family worried?”
I pleaded with him to leave us alone. Baba did not look up.
Finally, beyond the reporters, in the crowd, we spotted Ah Zhay and my brothers.
—
On such short notice, plane tickets were too expensive for Wei and the girls to come for the funeral.
“I can’t do it without you,” I said to Wei.
“I’m sorry.” I heard the guilt in his voice, as if he was apologizing for everything. “I love you. Hold on, Emily wants to talk to you.”
Emily came on the line. “Mom, I’m so sad. Tell Ah Gong we love him.” Her voice was choked and I heard her tears start as she handed the phone back to Wei.
“I miss you,” Wei said. “Come home soon.”
His words unstitched me all over again and I cried silently into the phone, finding small comfort as he uttered, “Hey, hey, hey. It’s okay. You’ll be home soon.”
What is home? I wanted to ask. Haven’t I already come home?
—
Mama’s funeral was held at the Second Municipal Funeral Home in Taipei, a large complex of ceremony rooms. My siblings and I wore traditional hemp robes and bowed before her casket, then followed it out to the crematorium. After Ah Zhay, Jie-fu, and my niece and nephews and their families left, my brothers and I waited in the parking lot for my mother’s ashes. Zhee Hyan smoked while leaning on the hood, and Baba sat in the passenger seat of Dua Hyan’s car with the door open. He was too exhausted to cry. I had heard him the night before, in his room, underneath the sound of the television, weeping. I had been staying in Mama’s room, trying to disturb as little as possible. I didn’t even touch a pencil on her desk. It was a diorama of her last days. In so many ways, she was still there. I opened the wardrobe. After all these years, she still wore the same perfume and it had seeped through all her clothes. I wondered how long it would linger.
When we collected her ashes, I was numbed by the notion of this pile of soft dust and bone debris. In the ba
ckseat of the car, I clutched the urn in my lap as Dua Hyan drove and Zhee Hyan finally shed his tears.
61
BEFORE I LEFT TAIPEI, I still had a few more stops. The first was 2-28 Peace Park, which was now a memorial. Not to the dead—that would be too controversial. Like so many memorials of atrocities, it was a monument to peace, a promise to never forget. A three-diamond sculpture with an antenna of geometric shapes rose out of a reflection pool. A plaque declared HEAVEN SHALL BLESS THIS ISLAND OF TREASURES, FORMOSA, TO PROSPER FOREVER. And in the former Broadcasting Bureau building, where anxious announcements had gone out the night of my birth, sat the museum memorializing the victims of the massacre that had forever changed my family.
Could we call this success? The country had exploded into a robust democracy with the end of martial law in 1987; the press burst forth in tabloid excess in an effort to fill up twenty-four hours of news, willing to cover any and all complaints, small and large. Voter turnout was sometimes as high as 75 percent. People celebrated this as a “bloodless” transition to democracy, ignoring the quiet revolution that had taken place for decades and the tens of thousands who had died in the streets, by the interrogator’s hand, or in prison for this victory.
Inside, the museum had re-created the scene of the cigarette seller’s conflict: a cart, cigarette cartons spread over the ground, a raucous city as the backdrop. From a photo, the widow gazed across six decades. She was young, her hair pulled back tightly off her forehead. This was the “old widow” whose pleading with the Monopoly Bureau agents had become the originating myth of this whole history? This woman who was not more than forty?
Upstairs, the faces of the dead, dozens of men in black-and-white photos, stared at me. Lim Mo-seng, Su Shui-mu, Wang Kui-liang, and on. And Jia Bao’s father, setting forth on the same fate that would curse his son. Before I even read the name, I knew it was him. Jia Bao, but for twenty-five years.
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