The Third Son (18 page)

Beside me, Pat puffed contentedly on a pipe, the corners of his blue eyes crinkled in a smile below the rim of his fedora. His left palm rested on the steering wheel, and his right manipulated the gearshift with casual skill and obvious pleasure.

He explained he was a dentist and had gotten involved with FOCUS through a “Chinaman” he had met at church. “I enjoy it,” he said. “For the most part you people from Taiwan are very polite, very educated. For some reason we don’t get the people who come to the United States to wait tables or work a Laundromat, though there are plenty of those already here, believe me.”

“We have to pass exams to enter United States legally,” I said. “Also, you advertise in English-language newspapers. Uneducated people will not be reading these.”

“True.” He glanced at me in surprise. “Your English is pretty good, you know.”

“I prepared,” I said. “I contacted every American in North Taiwan to practice conversation. I talked to many nuns and missionaries.”

“So you’re a churchgoer?”

“What? Church? No.”

“Well, many of your people become churchgoers here. It’s quite common. You should try it out.”

I had learned that the best thing to do when someone proselytized was to ignore it and pretend I didn’t understand. I did so now and he parked in silence.

I stepped out of the car, and my mouth dropped open at the massive bands of steel arching over the San Francisco Bay. Tiny cars moved across, their passage suspended by wires as graceful, as musical, as the strings of an ancient harp. And again I was struck by the massiveness—not just in physical size, but in conception, in boldness, and in ego. This was a country where such things could happen, where an engineer might be shown plans to build the longest, tallest bridge in the world and make it beautiful, too, and where he would say, “Oh, sure!”

Pat was gesturing for me to move. “Picture,” he said. “Look sharp!”

The bridge behind me, I gazed into the lens of Pat’s snappy Kodak Signet.

These United States, I thought. Impressive.

I
FOLLOWED PAT’S
lanky footsteps through the Muir Woods. Everything in this country was massive; even its trees were primordially large, their trunks reaching toward the mesosphere, their tops swaying in the cool breeze, converging at infinity. I breathed in the sweet air, unable to stop myself from filling my newly elastic lungs. The oxygen seeped into my meager blood. Already, I was stronger.

A
S TO WHY
Pat’s house was pink, or why a wealthy dentist would buy a row house sited on such a hilly, albeit quiet and tidy, street; as to why Pat marched with one of my suitcases right into his house and up the stairs to the bedrooms with his shoes still on his feet—these were mysteries whose answers I could not fathom. I simply kept my own shoes on, too, and marched up, teeth clenched at the pain in my back as I hauled the other suitcase up behind him. I was determined to keep my eyes open and learn as much about America as I could, and if that meant doing certain things that made no sense, so be it.

Pat was widowed or, I later realized, more likely divorced, and left me with my suitcases in his son’s vacated bedroom, cool, carpeted, dominated by a huge and extremely tempting bed draped with a guitar-print comforter, the walls plastered helter-skelter with posters of Nat King Cole and Billie Holiday. I changed my clothes and walked around the room to avoid falling asleep. While I paced, the doorbell rang twice, heralding visitors I could hear talking downstairs. Pat appeared again to bring me down and, when I declined liquor, set me up in the strangely odorless kitchen with a glass of 7UP. “There’s some ice in the fridge if you’d like,” he said, and he excused himself to the living room.

I stood in front of the refrigerator, gazing in amazement at the mammoth thing—turquoise blue with chrome accents, like Pat’s car. It hummed assertively, and when I pulled open the door, an interior bulb illuminated chrome shelves of shiny, brightly colored boxes, bottles of milk, drawers filled to the brim with apples and oranges. I opened a special compartment on the inside of the door, thinking the ice might be in there, but instead I found a dozen eggs, nestled perfectly. I should have known there would be a special compartment for eggs, that any American household would be assumed to have a dozen eggs on hand at all times.

I heard a rustle behind me, and like a naughty child, I quickly shut the egg door. A hand with red lacquered fingertips reached past me and opened a door over the shelves.

“The freezer’s here. I’m Mary, by the way, Dr. O’Reilly’s assistant.”

I turned to face her and jumped at the sight of her green eyes, glittering in the light of the refrigerator’s bulb as she scanned the freezer. All her colors shocked me—the pink of her face, the bright freckles on her nose, her curled orange hair. She looked very young, and far from looking like the movie stars I had seen on the screen, she resembled a little girl wearing her mother’s clothes.

“There.” She dropped two pieces of ice into my glass of 7UP, which I’d placed on the counter. She picked up the bucket and smiled, her lips painted to match her nails, her teeth small and white. “Come on into the living room.”

Her shoes clacked away on the black-and-white linoleum and then were muffled by the carpet. I followed her.

Unlike the kitchen, the living room was monochromatically white, with hardly anything on the walls and a thick white carpet covering the entire floor. There were furnishings such as I had never seen: a white vinyl sofa, a wrought iron and glass coffee table, matching end tables in teardrop shapes, a large, ornate stereo cabinet. Mary stepped soundlessly across the room and dropped ice into Pat’s glass and that of the “Chinaman” he was now conversing with, a self-effacing, slight man in a very modest suit jacket. Their conversation lapsed for a moment, giving way to the soft sounds of jazz, as Mary refilled their glasses.

I stepped toward them. After so many hours on the plane, I longed to take my shoes off and relax. Instead my leather soles slipped over the carpet’s thick pile, depositing microscopic dust particles from the Taiwanese streets onto the pristine nylon fibers. I was in limbo—inside, but wearing outside shoes. It was evening, but to my body it was earliest dawn. I was in America, walking toward another Taiwanese, whom I wanted to meet but also wished had not come, as I was eager to meet Americans and converse with them on my own. My head swirled with excitement, with confusion and fatigue.

“Chia-lin, this is Professor Hong.”

We shook hands.

Pat turned back to Professor Hong. “Really? Within the next year?”

“Of course, of course,” Professor Hong said. “Thousands of scientists all over the world are counting on this.”

“Now, aren’t the Russians claiming they’ll beat us up there? I heard just last week there was some crazy Russian saying they had intercontinental missiles right now that are powerful enough to blast satellites into orbit—”

“Well,” Hong said, “anyone can say anything. Russians just announced they will launch a satellite, fifty kilograms. This is simply too heavy for today’s rockets. It’s impossible feat.”

“I think you’re right. Those Commies are full of bluster.” Mary smiled as she passed around a silver tray of some kind of vegetable stuffed with white fatty paste that stuck to the insides of my mouth. I washed it down with 7UP, and the combination of stickiness, extreme sweetness, and the sting of carbonation made me gag.

“Where you from?” Hong said. He smiled, but his eyes, watching me, were sharp and wary. “Taipei?”

I swallowed, throat burning. “Taoyuan,” I said. “And you?”

“Kaohsiung.”

He nodded and was silent, looking down into his drink. I was surprised at his unfriendliness. I would have expected him to take me under his wing.

Perhaps he assumed I was ignorant.

“I heard you were talking about satellites,” I said. It felt a bit odd to be speaking to a Chinese man in English. “Is this your field?”

“No.” He looked up. “I am physicist only. Teaching at San Francisco State. But I have friends who study the atmospheric science, at University of Michigan.”

“Michigan? I’m going there tomorrow!”

“To Ann Arbor? When are you flying out?” Pat said.

Hong looked up at me with interest. “You study at University of Michigan?”

I felt a twinge of embarrassment. “Oh, I’m just visiting Michigan. I’m actually going to study at the South Dakota School of Mines.”

The doorbell rang and Pat excused himself.

Hong kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “You taking Greyhound bus to Ann Arbor?”

“Yes!” How had he known? I looked down at my breast pocket to see if my tickets were sticking out.

Mary gasped. Hong laughed, his eyes crinkling warmly. “I did same thing—to Tennessee! Poor boy. Those travel agents in Taiwan, they know nothing.”

“I should say so!” Mary stood with us, now holding her own drink. “It’ll take you a week to get there!”

I felt myself flush—embarrassed, despite Hong’s kind tone, that I was in fact ignorant. “I’m tired of flying,” I said irritably. “The propellers are so loud they give me a headache.”

“Sure.” Hong nodded generously.

“I thought there are turbojet engines already in this country.”

“Turbo what?” Mary said.

“Not for commercial airlines, not yet.” Hong laughed, and somehow the gentle way he patted my back made me realize that he was sorry for embarrassing me and meant me well. “Don’t worry, you will enjoy this ride. I enjoyed mine. It’s amazing landscape.”

I was just looking up at him in gratitude when his eyes widened at something behind me. All the warmth drained from his face, and he quickly took his hand from my back.

I turned to see what had so alarmed him. And nothing in all my borrowed issues of
Life
or
Time
had prepared me for what I would see at that moment. For there stood Pat O’Reilly in the doorway with a short Chinese man in a pin-striped suit—a man whom I recognized, with his thick, pursed lips, his thick black glasses frames, as the very same Mainland goon who had lurked in the musty corners of my father’s house during my father’s stint as mayor—the security general’s son. Pat gestured toward us, introducing Mary and Hong. “And Chia-lin, who’s just flown in from Taipei. And this, folks, is Kuo-hong. I just met him yesterday through one of our parishioners, and when he heard about FOCUS . . .”

My stomach clenched, and I felt, redoubled, that strange sense of limbo, of unreality. What was this Nationalist agent doing here? I quickly turned my head away, and as I did, my eyes met Hong’s.

“I know Hong very well,” Kuo-hong was saying, his voice unctuous but heavily accented. “Very smart man. And he your friend?”

“No,” Hong said quickly. “We meet here, a few minutes ago.”

“Chia-lin, what you study?”

I kept my eyes on my glass; it had a raised design on it in the shape of a penguin in a field of daisies, which I had not noticed before. I did not think Kuo-hong had paid much attention to me at my father’s house, as he had been hovering over my father most of the time, but it was possible he had observed me in passing. Though I had done nothing wrong, no good could come of letting someone like Kuo-hong recognize me. Hong’s alarmed reaction only confirmed what I felt myself, and I longed to ask Hong what he knew.

“Electrical engineering,” I said.

“Looking kind of familiar,” he said. “Where you from?”

Pat offered Kuo-hong a drink.

Kuo-hong walked over to me and chuckled, clinking my glass with his. “Study hard, Chia-lin!” He leaned close, peering up at me. His face was ruddy, smelling of alcohol, dried plums. There were good Mainlanders, I knew. One had saved me from expulsion, and many had died during the White Terror, falsely accused of Communism. But I felt an instinctive revulsion at this agent’s proximity. His kind spit on the sidewalk and destroyed whatever or whomever they did not understand. They did anything for money, nothing without a bribe.

“Don’t forget to stay out of trouble!” he said, smiling, and he left.

I
FOUND A
moment alone with Hong after dinner. We were sitting in the living room, where Pat and Mary had settled us with a plate of cookies. I tried to think of a way to determine Hong’s allegiances and ask about Kuo-hong without putting myself at risk.

Sweet potato or pig?

The vinyl of the couch squeaked under me as I leaned forward and picked a cookie off the top. It was plain and white.

“They look like
moachi
,” I said, indicating the cookies.

He smiled at this Japanese-Taiwanese word and spoke in Taiwanese. “Unfortunately they are not
moachi
.” He bit into his cookie.

I smiled, too, relieved to hear my native tongue. The fact that Hong spoke Taiwanese did not automatically mean that he was against the Nationalists, of course, but it increased the probability. He relaxed as the burden of speaking English was lifted.

“You knew Kuo-hong,” he commented. “I saw it in your face.”

“He’s a security officer,” I said. “My father was a member of the People’s Political Council for a time and they were all over the house.”