The Third Son (6 page)

“Shut up!” my father barked up at me. “You’ve caused enough trouble today.”

I sat down.

Kazuo climbed up onto the truck bed and smirked, brandishing the book and then sitting on top of it, right in front of me. “That’s better. And now you’ll have no more advantage, little boy.”

“That’s not fair,” Jiro whispered to me, his eyes wide. “That was yours.”

I was breathing so hard I had a stitch in my side. I would sooner have burned the book than give it to Kazuo. “I’ll get even with him someday,” I said under my breath. “Someday I’ll—”

I stopped, remembering to look back at the street.

Yoshiko and her family were gone.

6

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.

T
HROUGH 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.

T
ORU 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.

I
F
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.