I WAS FOR A time consumed by feelings of helplessness and rage. Walking by Kazuo’s room, I could see The Earth, shelved between his geometry and physical science textbooks. Kazuo never read the book, to my knowledge. For him it was a trophy, an assurance that he retained his superiority.
I could simply have taken it back. But since my mishandling of it had caused so much trouble, and since my father had in fact taken a great risk in retrieving the book from that Nationalist officer, I did not feel justified in taking it back. I was lucky enough that my father had punished me only in this way. At least The Earth was safe in our house. I tried to be satisfied with stealing into Kazuo’s room when he was not there and flipping the book open, its pages fluttering in the breeze that passed through the large screened windows of his room.
Reading the book was a balm for me through all the changes in the world outside. The Taiwanese textbooks we had studied between the Japanese departure and the Chinese takeover had been swept aside, and I was now called by that strange name, Tong Chia-lin. Outside, we were once again forbidden to speak our own language and forced instead to speak a foreign language. This time it was Mandarin Chinese, the four tones of which—as opposed to the eight of Taiwanese, the atonality of Japanese—we were still training our ears to recognize. We chanted, “Bo po mo fo,” and recited Chinese nursery tales in our cracking preadolescent voices. Between classes, I stole off to clamber up piles of hacked-up desks and peer through the windows at soldiers who lived in a blocked-off section of our school. Some sat on beds of rags, smoking. Others stripped our classrooms of shelving, lighting, the very outlets from the walls. They sold these things, I heard. They sold everything they could remove except for our Japanese textbooks. These they set fire to in the courtyard, along with our desks, cooking over them in huge blackened woks and squatting to eat on the ground, like the poorest of beggars.
In the streets, sirens wailed, signaling bank robberies and the looting of stores and factories. Toru’s own clinic was looted for stomach powders and antibiotics.
Once, I passed a grocery store where sacks of rice, barley, and sweet potatoes were piled outside the door. A small crowd had gathered and a small, wild-looking woman fended them off.
“I paid good money for these! They cost one hundred of those new dollars. My son’s upstairs, but he’ll be right down to carry these inside, so don’t get any ideas.”
“He’s too sick, Ma!” A girl’s voice called from inside the house.
“What are you talking about!” The woman wrung her hands, standing in front of the sacks. Her cheekbones were sharp and there were hollows beneath. “Well, my other son will be back any minute now.”
Why didn’t anyone help her?
“I’ll carry them in,” I said. Then, as I went to pick up a sack of rice, I saw that three men in the front of the crowd wore Nationalist uniforms. My heart flip-flopped, but I couldn’t fathom how helping this woman with her own rice could be wrong, so I kept my head down and carried the heavy sacks in, one by one.
“Chit pieng. Here.” The woman pointed me toward the dusty, empty shelves. Inside, she whispered, “You see those pigs think they can just take what they want.”
The crowd broke apart and I left the store as quickly as I could. I heard a voice call out from the second-floor window, but I was too scared to look back.
THROUGH THE MONTHS that Taiwan sank into chaos, I continued to steal into Kazuo’s room. He had a tutor to help him prepare for his high school entrance examinations, and as their voices sounded in the kitchen, I stood by his bookshelf flipping through The Earth. I didn’t dare sit, for fear of leaving traces of my presence on his chair or futon. It was in Kazuo’s room one day, as I carefully pushed The Earth back onto its shelf so the spine lined up with the others, that I saw a sheet of paper on his desk. It was set in the middle, as though it were especially important.
Examinations to Determine Eligibility to Pursue Graduate Study in the United States take place yearly in October. The top twelve scorers in the country will be allowed to apply for a United States student visa. Subjects to include English, mathematics, physics, history, biology, chemistry . . .
Scrawled across the top of the announcement was a handwritten note:
No one’s passed from Taoyuan County. Let’s be the first!—Li-wen
And at that moment, looking down at Kazuo’s fine, neat desk, surrounded by the handsome screened windows facing the courtyard and the stacks of new, folded clothes I would someday get thirdhand, I knew what I had to do. I would take that examination. I would beat Kazuo to America.
TORU HAD BEEN right: academic success could be my ticket to see the world. And I needed to make up for lost time. The Taiwanese education system was rigidly tiered. All the students who had passed the American entrance exam had graduated from one school—Taiwan University, unequivocally the best school on the island. If I wanted to get into Taiwan University, I had to go to the top high school, and if I wanted to go to the top high school, I had to go to the top middle school. There was no dodging this tracking system. One misstep now would send me down a lesser path, and I would never get the education I needed to pass the most difficult exam in Taiwan.
And so when the time neared for my middle school entrance exams, for the first time in my life I was nervous about them. Even so, I was unable to study systematically. I was distracted by too many things—the fields, the sky, a neighborhood dog who loved to roam and splash in the paddies when I threw sticks. Only after the dog bit me on the calf did I sit down for one or two days with my Chinese schoolbooks. This was more than I had ever done for an exam, and strangely, the pain focused my mind. I sat in the examining room, blood seeping into the iodine-soaked rags my mother had wrapped around my leg, and sorted through logic problems that I would normally have found too tedious to undertake: There are thirty legs in a roomful of turtles and storks, and twice as many turtles as storks. How many of each animal?
In the end I passed my first hurdle: getting into the premier middle school in Taipei—Chien Kuo. Chien Kuo’s high school was likewise considered the top high school on the island, and going through the middle school was considered the inside route to Taiwan University.
The fact that I passed Chien Kuo’s entrance examination had caused much surprise and celebration—even announcements in the newspaper and on the radio. I was the first from my elementary school ever to have passed, and I had not been one of its top students. My family considered my success a fluke; one of my uncles asked frankly whether my father had interceded on my behalf. But my mother, in a fit of appreciation, made a pair of navy-blue shorts just for me—the first brand-new clothes I had ever had. I stroked the seams, marveling at how many times my mother had poked her needle through the cotton. Of course I knew that she had made pants for Kazuo out of the same fabric. But even so—so much labor! For me! I strolled around in those shorts like a king.
IF I WANTED to be one of the top twelve students on the island, however—the best student Taoyuan County had ever seen—I would need to actually study. I was not at all one of the top students in my class at Chien Kuo, though according to my teacher, who said so in a rather peeved way, I could be if I paid as much attention to his lectures as I did to the workmen outside who built the concrete walls of our school’s new wing.
I resolved to turn a corner, to take my studies seriously. And so it was that, one February morning in 1947, I hopped off the train at Taipei Station having actually read the books that were in my bag. My brothers Kazuo and Jiro ran off toward their school, and I toward the part of the city by the botanical gardens. I smiled to myself, confident that from now on I would be that stellar student Teacher Lee thought I could be. I imagined myself without my brothers, in a world of movie stars, Cadillacs, and freedom.
But in the streets, there was a sense of disquiet that I had not noticed before today. Since the Nationalist takeover there had been much grumbling in houses and behind closed doors, but now clusters of people stood together at newsstands, talking loudly.
“She was just trying to make a living!”
“They just want the money for their own pockets!”
“Tell them to go try a day of work for a change!”
“I would’ve given them something to remember—”
A freshly painted banner hanging over the street read, THE DOGS GO AND THE PIGS COME!
I had never seen anything so bold. We all knew that “dogs” referred to the Japanese, and “pigs” to the Nationalist Chinese, but to hang it out there in broad daylight . . . Though I never thought I would have missed the Japanese soldiers, I missed the feeling of safety and order we had had before. As my book bag slapped against my side, I hastened past a bashed-in bank and a grocery store sporting the sign RICE! BUY TODAY BEFORE PRICES RISE TOMORROW! Glass crunched under my feet and I smelled something burning.
When I reached the school gates, I breathed out with relief and only then realized I had been holding my breath for quite some time. Inside, though, we were shuttled from our regular classroom into the newly constructed wing of the school.
It was the first Friday I was actually prepared for our test, and Teacher Lee was late. The principal—a Mainlander, of course, like all our teachers—poked his head in and said in his usual severe way that Teacher Lee was at a special teachers’ meeting and that we must wait patiently and cause no trouble or we would be in trouble ourselves. As we waited for him, my classmates talked, louder and louder, our voices deadening in the still-drying walls of cement that surrounded us.
“What can the teachers be talking about all this time?”
“Whatever those Mainland pigs talk about. Who knows?”
“You’d better be quiet!”
“Why? We’re all sweet potatoes here—we’re all Taiwanese.”
“It smells like cow dung in here.”
“Did you hear about that woman selling cigarettes?”
“Didn’t she die—”
“No, I heard they shot into the crowd and killed people that way.”
“Did you see that banner?”
I went to the wall, stuck my finger in it, and dragged my finger through the mixture of mud and rice straw, tracing out a square Mainlander face with a round nose and a single hair growing out of the chin. “Teacher Lee,” I said. I curved out my line to make the potbelly.
Everyone burst out laughing behind me, and I smiled, enjoying the feeling of being liked, the center of attention.
Soon others joined me at the wall. “Is it okay to draw here?”
“Sure,” I said. “They’ll just put plaster over this. Usually they just score the wall with bamboo branches. The drawings will do the same thing and help it stick.”
The smooth surface of the wall disappeared under googly-eyed faces and B-29 bombers. I laughed, jubilant at the sensation of being for once in the thick of a group rather than on the fringes. And then suddenly, footsteps sounded on the plywood outside our classroom door.
We tripped over each other, scurrying to our seats.
The door opened, and Teacher Lee appeared—bald, his brow furrowed, his nose bulbous and red. “Rise,” he said, walking to his desk, and we all stood.
“Good morning, Teacher Lee,” we chanted in Mandarin.
“Sit.”
And it was at that point, when we had all sat back down and he turned to the chalkboard, that his eyes widened. He walked slowly around the classroom, looking at the walls. He stopped in front of my drawing of him, and I saw, with a mingling of pride and fear, that my classmates had given it a fairly wide margin in their own doodlings.
But could it be? The nose I had drawn looked just like a pig’s snout. How could I possibly have drawn such a thing on a day like today? I hoped desperately that he would think it was something else, a caricature of some other person.
Teacher Lee’s ears turned red. For several agonizing moments he said nothing but only stared at my drawing, nostrils flaring, belly heaving.
Then he turned to us. “Who has done this?”
I looked at his face, flushed and twisted. I could not have drawn his nose any other way.
I stood. I was in the front, as we had been seated by exam score, and I knew my classmates would stand up also, because everyone had drawn on the wall and all we had to do was explain.
But then I saw that only one other boy, the one directly behind me, was standing, too. He sniffled, eyes watery and terrified as he wiped them on his sleeve.
My mouth went dry. I felt a rushing sound in my ears. Yet still I felt, if only I could just explain how the wall was constructed. My teacher was an intelligent, educated man, but he was a gua shing-a—a Mainlander—and Mainlanders did not seem to understand how things operated. They ran wires across railroad tracks. They ran flat tires into the ground. They gathered in groups to gawk at elevators. “Teacher Lee,” I said, facing him, “the walls are not actually ruined. All the pictures will disappear. You see, they put plaster over—”
“Tong Chia-lin,” he said sharply, “did you vandalize this property?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Two black marks! And you?” He pointed his chin at the boy behind me.
“I am s-sorry, Teacher Lee.”
“You get one.”
“But—”
“Shut up, Tong!” Teacher Lee pointed at me, his finger quivering. “Two black marks means you are on probation. I will notify your parents immediately.”
Indignation flashed up inside me. “But Teacher Lee—” I said.
He stepped toward me, glaring, his face scrunched up in fury. I was almost as tall as he was, and he breathed into my face, the capillaries of his skin crisscrossing his nose.
“Tong Chia-lin,” he said, “do not say another word. You have the mind, you have the opportunity to get the best education available on this lousy, ungrateful island. If you say one more word, you will lose that opportunity.”
My heart pounded on the front of my chest. I opened my mouth.
“You people,” he said. His shaking finger jabbed at me, then at the window facing the street, where a siren wailed, its pitch rising, then lowering as it passed. “You people think you can get away with breaking the rules, with insubordination. You think you are better than me, do you? Well, we will see about that, won’t we? Because I am the one with the upper hand.”
My heart hammered. I knew that I should be prudent and swallow my pride, that my future was at stake and I would do well to save my fighting for another day. But my indignation swelled up. It rose on a hot tide brimming with fury over losing The Earth, with the headiness of the anti-Nationalist banners and the crescendo of discontent in the streets, and it exploded forth, over the threats and the fear and the prudence. The truth was on my side. “But Teacher Lee,” I said, “we did not cause any damage. You’re punishing us for being honest!”
Teacher Lee stepped toward me, his face quivering. His finger pointing. “Tong Chia-lin, I told you not to say one more word. You have defied me, and I expel you from this school.”
His eyes bored into mine, his face engorged with hatred that extended far beyond my preadult body, into the streets and city squares, the valleys and dormant volcanoes, that were at Taiwan’s heart. No one spoke. The silence was broken only by the sound of his quickened breathing and a class letting out for recess down the hall. The chattering and footsteps receded. And then a door slammed shut.
I WALKED OUT through the school gates, legs wobbly, arms trembling.
I expel you!
Why hadn’t I kept my mouth shut? How could I go home now?
“Sweet potato or pig?” a man shouted at me.
I jumped. A group of young men encircled me on the sidewalk. They were dressed like college students but clutched bricks and empty bottles by the neck.
“Hun-chi,” I said. Sweet potato. My voice shook, a half whisper.
They brushed past me, walking toward downtown Taipei. They broke into a Taiwanese folk song my relatives often sang at parties to celebrate the midnight orchid’s annual bloom.
Rainy-night flower
Blown to the ground by the wind and rain
No one takes heed of you
When your petals touch Earth, they will never return to life.
I watched, erupting in shivers. Sirens sounded. Their sound waves overlapped, distorted, as though the air itself no longer conformed to the laws of physics. I no longer recognized the world.
A government car zoomed down the street, and the young men who had challenged me pelted the car with bottles as it passed. A fist emerged from the car window. The sight of this, and the sound of angry shouts, roused me, and I ran toward the train station, ducking into a side entrance.
The train platform overflowed with people—people in business suits, farmers with chickens under their arms, children like me in their school uniforms.
“What’s going on?” I asked a boy.
“They’ve shut down the railways.”
I wandered through the restless, anxious crowd. How was I to get home? I climbed onto an empty vendor’s cart to look over the sea of black heads to the empty tracks.
“Saburo! Saburo!” Toru’s face popped up out of the crowd, and he waved.
I scrambled down, and he pulled me by the arm through the crowd and out of the station. A jeep was waiting at the curb, engine running, and Toru ushered me into the backseat between him and Jiro, who looked out the window with a stick clutched in his hand. His eyes were wide and scared, his other fist clenched so the muscles in his arms bulged. The Taoyuan magistrate sat at the wheel, my father and Kazuo squished beside him.
Toru slammed the door shut.
“What’s the stick for?” I whispered to Jiro.
“In case we need to fight. You should get something, too.”
I pictured him in the street, all muscle and male instinct. All I had in my bag was a pencil. Even my schoolbooks had been taken away.
“Okay,” my father said, glancing around, his eyes fearsome. I had no doubt he could have commanded an army. “Let’s go.”
The magistrate pulled away from the curb. “Let’s try this way.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Riots,” Toru said. “The police beat up a Taiwanese woman for selling foreign cigarettes without a license last night. People saw it and went crazy, attacked the police. And the police fired back.”
The jeep swerved and stopped suddenly, jamming me into Jiro. His stick whacked me in the chin. I cried out at the pain.
“Aiyo!” In the street in front of us, a truck blazed, flames roaring out of its windows. People ran past us on either side, away from the fire. The acrid smell of burning oil filled the jeep.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” my father said.
The magistrate turned the jeep around and drove on, and I leaned into Toru.
“We can get out this way. Look!” The magistrate indicated a crowd gathering to our left in front of a large building. “The governor’s mansion! I’ve heard they’ve taken the Monopoly Bureau, too. The workers just gave up and left.”
“Hm!” my father said. “Went home to get their guns. Let’s not be stupid. Come on, this isn’t a sightseeing tour.”
But the magistrate paused, hands on the steering wheel, head cocked. The crowd was singing.
“Listen!” the magistrate said. “It’s ‘Repairing the Fisherman’s Net.’ ”
Looking at the net, my eyes redden—such a hole!
I want to repair it but have not a thing . . .
“Let’s go!” my father cried out. “Kianh-kianh!”
“Taiwan’s only happy folk song,” Toru said quietly.
The magistrate laughed, obviously stirred as the crowd continued. “Happy?”
Who knows my pain?
If we let it go today, our future is hopeless . . .
“The last stanza,” Toru said. “She fixes it.”
“Kianh-kianh!” My father shouted, reaching for the steering wheel.
“Bien-la. Bien-la. We’re going.” The magistrate wheeled the car around. “I still think you should join the Settlement Committee,” the magistrate said to my father, pushing up his glasses. “I think the people have shown their will and we might be able to get Chen Yi to—”
“Enough!” my father said. “A minnow does not negotiate with a shark! Who cares about words when they have Chiang’s army across the strait?”
As they argued, Toru whispered to me, “Where were you? We went to your school to pick you up, but you weren’t there.”
For a couple of moments I had forgotten about being expelled. Now I remembered again, and shame washed over me. What would Toru think of me now? I had failed more completely than I ever thought possible. I looked up at him, but he was now peering out the window.
“Wait!” he said suddenly. “Stop the car! Someone’s injured.”
The magistrate braked, but my father roared, “No! Drive on! We don’t even know who it is!”
“It doesn’t matter!” Toru said.
“Of course it does!”
I peered out the window. A small group of people were clustered around someone lying on the ground.
“If it’s a Mainlander, they’ll lynch us! Go!” my father yelled.
“I’ve treated Mainlanders before. I treated one just last night and he was very grateful. He was injured by a mob—”
“Exactly! What would you do, anyway? You have no equipment.”
The crowd turned to look at our car.
“Go!”
A man raised his arm as though in greeting and then casually lobbed a stone toward our jeep. The stone sailed straight at us through Toru’s open window.
Suddenly, Toru’s arm was across my face and he was leaning hard on me, pushing me into Jiro. Jiro screamed.
“Ahh!” I cried out. “I can’t breathe.”
“Saburo! Jiro! Are you all right? Toru!”
The jeep squealed away, pressing us all backward. We pulled out of downtown Taipei, and Toru sat up.
“Are you all right?” he said. As he looked at me, I saw that his cheek was bleeding.
“Toru!” I said. “The rock hit you in the face!”
Toru felt his cheek, then folded up his handkerchief and held it to the wound.
My father looked back, his eyes dark. “We are not the Red Cross,” he said.
WHEN WE GOT home, I tried to sneak off unnoticed, hoping that in all the furor over the riots the termination of my academic career would pass without notice. But after a few moments my father called to me, and I found myself facing him in his great-room armchair. I closed my eyes for a moment, knowing what was to come.
He paused, looking into the distance, one massive hand holding a smoldering cigarette, the other on the radio dial as the reports continued.
. . . It is unclear how many men perished when police fired into the unarmed crowd at the governor’s mansion, but the killings only seem to have fueled more outrage in the native populace . . .
He jumped up, surprisingly nimble for his weight, and smashed his fist onto the table so the ashtray jumped. I flinched.
“I knew Chen Yi was a butcher!” he said. “He killed all those students on the Mainland, I heard it from the Japanese. What would he do here? Hand over his mansion with no fight?”
I said nothing, as I knew this tirade was not for my benefit; my father rarely discussed politics with me. But I realized at that moment that we had gotten out of Taipei just in time, and that he had knowingly risked his life to pick up Kazuo, Jiro, and me.
He straightened up to face me.
“I have received a message from your school,” my father said. He crossed his arms so his bow tie tilted. He looked at me, his eyes black and impenetrable.
I looked down. I knew the best thing for me to do now would be to grovel on the floor, pounding my head and crying for forgiveness and mercy. Distracted and distressed as he was about the riots, it might have done the trick. But perhaps because I knew it was what he wanted, I could not bring myself to do it. “It was just the underside of the wall,” I said. “They put plaster over it.”
My father unfolded his arms and narrowed his eyes. “Stupid! Why are you giving me excuses?” He swung out his arm and struck me across the head.
My head exploded with pain. I hit the floor, gasping. The pain was like a weight on my temple that I couldn’t lift, and I moved my legs like a squashed bug, trying to rise off the dark floorboards. When my father spoke, I could hear him only through the ear that was against the floor; the ear he had hit was filled with a loud ringing. The words came to me, pinched and dim:
“Stupid! No school will take you now! You’ve ruined your life!”
My father clicked the radio back on, and as my breath moistened the floor, I heard the announcer’s voice, muffled by the floor and my half deafness.
. . . government has been paralyzed. Native Taiwanese leaders are planning to organize a set of demands to set forth . . .
This was my father’s trademark form of punishment. Not a continuous beating like my mother’s, but the one blow that lasted for hours.
I LAY ON my futon, head throbbing. My hearing was coming back, and I listened to the wind. Winter was coming, sweeping through the porous walls of the house, rattling the window frames. I was cold all the way through.
My father talked in the next room with the magistrate and the former railroad commissioner.
A burst of wind shook the house so hard that a bottle fell off the windowsill and spilled gentian violet on the floor. It pooled, iridescent, on the blackened pine.
I heard the magistrate’s refined voice: “At least the Japanese were not corrupt. If you broke a rule, they tortured you—”
“Killed you, you mean—”
“If you didn’t, they left you alone.”
“They knew how to govern,” the railroad commissioner said. “How to grow industry, how to run the railroad. They wanted a good economy. They weren’t just out to strip the land and sell everything to the motherland for profit.”
“Yes, while these gua shing-a ship all our rice to their troops in China.”
“They’re saying we hoard it.”
“Of course they deny it! But we can tell. The people at the docks can all see the rice being loaded onto ships.”
“At least the Japanese knew how to distribute the rice. No one liked the rationing, but—”
“But at least they cared whether we ate.”
“Don’t forget how many people they killed during the resistance!” my father said suddenly.
“Well, but it was straightforward. It was an armed resistance, like a war. What I’m talking about is—”
“Fool!” my father exclaimed. “Remember that ‘amnesty celebration’ where they slaughtered their guests of honor? How many were there? Three hundred?”
“We don’t need the Japanese or the Mainlanders!”
“The dogs go and the pigs come!”
I pulled my blanket around me and listened to the wind that swept south from Siberia and whistled through the cracks in our walls. I closed my eyes, seeing the burning truck, the legs of the person we had left injured in the street. I saw Teacher Lee’s shaking finger, the Nationalist officer waving The Earth, Yoshiko holding hands with her father and her brother. She touched her palm to my head. The snake bit me. Keiko Sato pointed to the sky.