The Third Son (13 page)

“
I
didn’t. But he did. He always wanted to go, and then he met a Mainlander who kept whispering in his ear and convinced him that if he could only get a boat, they could sell sugarcane to Japan and get rich quick.”

“When was this?”

“Just after the war.”

“But we weren’t on good terms with Japan—”

“Of course. So my father and his friend spent all our money to lease a boat from the government. They sailed into Japan with the Nationalist flag flying and got arrested before they even reached Okinawa.”

“They went to jail?”

“House arrest. And by the time they were released, the boat’s lease had expired and they didn’t dare come back to Taiwan because they were afraid of what the government would do about the expired lease. That’s what he says, anyway.”

“So they stayed in Japan?”

“No. They went to China. For a year.”

“A year! And what about you?”

“We starved. We still had the grocery store at the time, but my mother knows nothing about business—she’s illiterate. My brothers quit school to help in the store and I did the books. I was twelve, but even I knew the money was going in the wrong direction. We closed down more and more aisles of the store until we were just selling rice.

“Every week my mother would cry, ‘Li-hsiang, what will we do? Your father has left us, and now we will eat only sweet potatoes all winter.’ And I would get her one of the red envelopes of New Year’s money that relatives had given me over the years. Then my mother would nod and say, ‘Now we can eat for this week.’ But then I ran out of red envelopes, except for one, which I hid in case of emergency. That’s when my sisters ran away to Taipei. They couldn’t take it. And that’s when Kun-tai got pneumonia.”

“My little brother died of pneumonia,” I said.

“Oh!”

“He was just three. Go on.”

She looked up at me, her eyes searching mine. “Kun-tai was so weak. He couldn’t lift the sacks of rice anymore. The delivery men would dump them on the sidewalk, and all the soldiers would gather around like vultures. My other brother got tired of doing all the work, and sometimes he took off with his friends. My mother was helpless. One time there was a boy who helped her, a brave boy—”

“But your uncles with the lumberyard—” I said, “didn’t they help?”

She laughed bitterly. “My number one uncle would drop by in his rickshaw and give me a little sweet treat and shake his head. My mother treated him so well, warmed up sake for him whenever he came . . . Even at twelve, I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t help us.

“The police kept breaking into our house at night because of the ship. Swept through our beds with flashlights, looking for my father. One afternoon there was a knock at the door, and this strange man ran into the house, all in white, with sunglasses and a mustache. My mother and I screamed, thinking it was a policeman, but it was my father in disguise.”

She laughed briefly. “He was so excited. ‘I have been to Mainland China! I have brought back textile manufacturing equipment that will make us a fortune!’ ”

Yoshiko looked down at her purse, playing with its strap.

“But by that time, Kun-tai was already dying. I used my last red envelope to send him to a Western doctor, but there was nothing to be done.”

Her voice broke. From the adjacent hall came the sound of a nun’s chanting, accompanied by the piercing hollow beats of the
muyu.

“The equipment my father brought back—it was junk. Worthless.” She shifted, part of the fabric of her skirt falling onto my knee. “So after that,” she said, “I decided my fate is my own, and my life is going to be different.” She turned to look me full in the face, her eyes glistening and fierce. “My family’s going to survive. Memories are good,” she said, “but living people are better.”

I stood up, incensed. “My brother died, too, though we had plenty of money,” I said. “Money is not enough for life.” She looked up at me in surprise. My heart raced and I felt the heat rise to my face. “Have Kazuo if you think he will make you happier!” I said, my voice shaking. “But I’ll have you know I am not your father. I would not leave you to starve. And that boy who brought in the rice for your mother—that was me.”

I turned my back to her and made my way out of the temple. At the door I looked back and saw her watching me. She was standing motionless among the flickering candles, the curling ascent of incense smoke, and the people stepping up and down to the different levels of the courtyard. The gray figure of her mother rose from where she had knelt. As she turned, the shadows pooled beneath her cheekbones.

I turned away and went into the street.

12

K
AOHSIUNG WAS NOT FAR
enough away for me to go. The thought that I had lost Yoshiko, that Kazuo would bring her home as his bride, their bed just steps from mine, so enraged me that I barely registered the endless military exercises in which I was forced to participate. Rousing from my tortured thoughts, I found myself at various times singing the national anthem, polishing my shoes, and running in formation in a field, shouting, “We shall take back the motherland!”

At night my bunkmates laughed and teased one another and dragged me to cafés and dances. One of the other servicemen was a ballroom-dance instructor and taught us to waltz, tango, and fox-trot. In the dance halls, I held the hand of one girl or another and impressed her with my steps, which seemed decisive merely because I made the steps without taking the least notice of what my partner was doing. The breaks between dances were the most awkward. The girls I danced with wanted to talk, and even if they were very pretty, it was all I could do to keep my mind from wandering off, from wondering where Yoshiko was and whether she was with Kazuo. I had never had a chance to dance with her. Had Kazuo, holding her waist, like this? Had he touched her?

“You’re not listening to me,” one girl said, her perky, round face suddenly falling into a frown.

“Yes, I am,” I said. “You teach . . . eh . . .”

“Kindergarten.” She turned and walked away.

The next evening I pretended to have a stomachache and stayed in the barracks when my bunkmates went dancing. I reached into my bag and pulled out
Fundamentals of the English Language for Foreigners.
I had taken it from Kazuo’s room when I left.

I had been through the book before, but that night and in the weeks that followed I read it with renewed intensity. I forced myself to think about conjunctions, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs—all the strange little connecting words that Mandarin Chinese did not have, or that Japanese used, but quite differently.

As I studied, I thought, Why not try the American entrance exam? The common belief was that only Taiwan University gave adequate preparation for it, but I had access to books. I could read. What did I have to lose except a little pride?

My stomach growled, unsatisfied by our wretched meals—rice with pickled cucumber, soggy yellow daikon, and fried gluten. But my hunger only spurred me on to study more, because I knew what hunger was. Hunger was home, and only by leaving for good could I truly be free of that gnawing in my belly.

I had brought other books, too. Chemistry, physics, engineering. Mostly they were American, bearing the imprint of universities I imagined to be massive, humming with brilliance and intellectual activity.

I studied, and the time, which had seemed so interminably slow, seemed now to fly. The next American entrance exam was in less than a year. In ten months, in eight, in six.

I
WENT HOME
for spring leave. The rain was just lightening to mist in Kaohsiung when the train pulled away. It had been raining for days, and as we passed the verdant central mountains, the rivers spilled forth, splitting into gurgling branches that infused the land below—the broad valleys and plains encompassing Taipei and Taoyuan—with the possibility of life. I imagined Yoshiko’s mother as a child, bumping down the mountain in an oxcart and up along a coast she had probably never seen until that day, hoping that whatever lay ahead would be better than what she had known.

To her right, to my right, farmers toiled on the paddies that checkered the broad Chainan Plain; farmer after straw-hatted farmer, knee-deep in the water, pushing down the plow behind his water buffalo, as he and his fathers had under the Dutch, the Spanish, the Japanese, and now the Mainland Chinese.

I
N AN OPPRESSED
society, there are three main means of survival. There is the farmer’s way, plowing on as he has for centuries, his hat shadowing his face. There is my father’s method, of opportunism. And then there are those who cannot or will not accept things as they are. Like Yoshiko’s mother, who came down from the mountains, and the Taoyuan magistrate, who was killed, they must either speak up or leave and seek freedom elsewhere. This last option, I was increasingly beginning to feel, would be my way.

I had never felt so sure that I would escape as I did on that bus. Though I was going home to discuss a potential job at Taikong, I had gotten all the way through my English-language textbook. I had mastered that idiosyncratic language. How many people knew the intricacies of tense or the different uses of articles as I did? I wouldn’t need a job at Taikong for long. I was going to America.

At my parents’ house, I pushed open the heavy oak door, and the smell of an egg fried in lard hit me full across the face. Kazuo was home from medical school.

I went into the kitchen, where Kazuo read the newspaper over his empty, egg-smeared bowl. He looked up at me, his thick lips open in surprise.

I looked around for my mother. “Where’s
Kachan
?” I said.

“Getting ready to go to the market.”

“I suppose she’s out of eggs,” I said.

“Yes.” Kazuo smiled slightly.

I felt a surge of anger. “I haven’t heard anything about you getting engaged, by the way.”

“What? Oh, you mean that girl.” He waved his hand dismissively and shook out his newspaper. “Superstitious bitch. She said our zodiac signs were incompatible.” He glanced at me over the paper. “She’s engaged to a friend of mine. Studies poetry at Taiwan University. Got a job lined up in his daddy’s bank.”

My stomach lurched.

You think I’m a gold digger, do you?

“Don’t fret, my boy.” Kazuo smoothed down the page of his paper. “She’s not worth it. There are plenty of girls prettier than her.”

I
SPENT THE
rest of the day lying on my futon, brooding. But by the next morning I realized that nothing had changed. I had not had Yoshiko before, I did not have her now, and I never would. It was time to get out.

I went downtown and registered for the American entrance exam.

I zoomed home on my father’s motorcycle, eyes tearing in the wind, ears filled with the roaring of the engine as the buildings and marketplaces streamed behind me in a blur. As I passed Jin-fu Temple, a small boy leaped from a cart into the chaotic street after his dog. Honks and curses rose up around them and I swerved to a stop behind a rickshaw. I put my foot down and couldn’t resist looking to my left at the familiar little two-story building flanked by towers.

But behind the large windows where the pharmacy’s counter had been, there were now mannequins in flowered skirts and tailored suits.

I walked the motorcycle onto the sidewalk. Next to the window, red silk was draped over a chair, the folds shimmering in the light of the street. Dress forms stood around the room on tables, wearing inside-out blouses or swathes of lace, and in the back, a woman with curly, gray-streaked hair and glasses spread a bolt of fabric on the counter and sketched a line on it with chalk.

Had Yoshiko’s family moved? I sat on the motorcycle, looking at the woman at the counter. Who was she? I toyed with the idea of going in to ask her what had happened to the pharmacy, but I felt foolish at the idea of entering a dress shop.

What would be the point, anyway? Bitter again, I revved the engine and started off.

“Aiiieeeeee—”

A woman screamed and jumped out of my way. I swerved and fell with the bike to the ground. As I tried to get up, a searing pain went down my leg.

“Saburo?”

I looked up. There above me was Yoshiko. She was wearing a deep red long-sleeved dress that made her skin look even whiter and more translucent than I remembered. Against the grimy striped awning overhead, the peeling wall of the building behind her, she was absurdly beautiful.

“Yoshiko!” I flushed. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here.”

I stood and righted the motorcycle. Her eyes shone and she smiled as she looked up to meet my gaze, the white of her throat stretching from the rose-trimmed neckline of her dress.

I looked away, unable to bear her loveliness or the warmth in her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Where’s the pharmacy?” I tried to be polite, but my tone came out gruff.

“Well, it failed, of course. We’re just renting to this seamstress. She’s very nice. I’m already good friends with her daughter.”