The Third Son (8 page)

“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.

7

T
HE OUTDOORS BECKONED, THE
long grass bending in the cool wind with innocent grace, but we were not to leave the house. The streets remained anarchic and my parents could take no risks that we might either get into trouble ourselves or incriminate the family with careless remarks. Lying on my futon, trapped and despairing as I was, I developed stomach pains. Yet I was ravenously hungry. At each meal, Kazuo taunted me, calling me a dropout. My mother, as she always had, apportioned the meat to him first, my youngest sister next, then the other siblings. Since my expulsion, her rations were even harsher, and by the time she got to me, there was no meat left.

“What will you be now? A janitor?”

I was silent, chewing my rice, flavored with soy sauce and invective.

As I lay back onto my futon, I heard snippets of news from the radio. The Settlement Committee, of which the Taoyuan magistrate was a member, had presented the Thirty-Two Demands to Governor Chen Yi and his government, calling for steps toward greater Taiwanese representation—the enactment of a provincial autonomy law, new elections of the People’s Political Councils, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Governor Chen Yi announced that he would meet with the Settlement Committee to negotiate.

My father snorted. “They hope the Americans will hear,” he said. “They could just have knocked off all the Mainlanders, but they think this way they’ll be let into the United Nations.” He spoke derisively, but as he brought a teacup to his lips he had a wistful expression on his face.

But then, on March 8, my father’s cynicism was once again proved correct. Chiang Kai-shek’s Twenty-First Division arrived at Keelung and Kaohsiung. These were not like the bedraggled troops we had initially welcomed with a parade; they were the Nationalists’ most notorious soldiers. They had been told Taiwan was host to a Communist uprising, and having lost so many lives to the Communists, the new troops were vengeful and unmerciful. They swept through the cities, killing every man, woman, and child they encountered in the streets. Chen Yi’s concessions had been a farce, designed to buy time as the division boarded boats on the other side of the Taiwan Strait.

The next morning, the magistrate was dragged out of his house and shot in front of his wife and children. In the days to come, a similar fate befell all other members of the Settlement Committee who had not yet gone into hiding, as well as the members of the Loyal Service Corps, university student activists, prominent doctors, lawyers, politicians, and any person who performed or had ever performed the criminal act of showing leadership or offending a Mainland official.

We stayed inside. My parents would not even answer the door, as they had heard that the Nationalists would shoot whoever opened it. It was a fail-safe way of eliminating heads of households.

During our isolation I dribbled a ball in the courtyard with Jiro or folded airplanes for my youngest brother and sister out of musty old newspapers. But my stomach pains worsened and I began having diarrhea with blood in it. I grew so light headed and weak that I retreated to my futon, seeing, on the way, Kazuo’s room with
The Earth
tantalizingly on his shelf as he studied, his broad back hunched over his desk. Just walking the few yards from the courtyard to my room winded me. My body was dwindling with my dreams; I was becoming a shadow.

One day my parents summoned Toru to the house to attend to a painful rash on my mother’s shin. As he was already out seeing patients, they didn’t mind asking him to make the trip to our house. Doctors weren’t safe from persecution—a prominent physician downtown had recently disappeared and was presumed dead—but Toru was a young doctor who was not yet prominent or politically active, so he seemed less likely to be targeted.

I heard Toru’s calm voice in the great room. “It’s a spider bite,” he was saying. “There’s nothing to do.”

“I’ve been putting this cream on it to make it feel better,” my mother said.

“
Ane hou.
”

“I wanted to be a nurse, you know. It was my parents who wanted me to stop school and help on the farm. Otherwise I was very smart and I could have gotten into a good nursing school.”

“Of course you could have,” Toru said.

I stood in the shadows of the hallway. I wanted so much to see Toru, yet I felt too ashamed. He must have learned of my expulsion by now.

My father asked him for news. Toru, lowering his voice, replied that he had treated a university professor who had been held for questioning. For two days the professor had been tightly bound with sharp wire, so that every movement had caused the wire to cut into his flesh.

“. . . and I saw a ten-year-old boy with stumps for hands because a soldier wanted his bicycle. The child told me he refused to give up the bicycle because it was his father’s, and the soldier simply sliced off the boy’s hands with a bayonet, took the bike, and left the child screaming and bleeding on the street. Luckily there were passersby who stopped his bleeding and brought him to me. They picked his hands up, too, but I am not a surgeon, nor could I find anyone else skilled enough to reattach them.”

“
Ho!
” my father exclaimed. “What a horror!”

“I dream about that poor boy at night,” Toru said. “You are right to keep your children at home.”

M
Y MOTHER INSISTED
that Toru stay for dinner.

I sat listlessly at the table, picking at my rice and avoiding Toru’s eyes while he talked in low tones with my parents about the government crackdown.

“Boats are having trouble passing through Keelung Harbor,” Toru said, “because it’s so plugged up.”

“Plugged up with what?” Jiro said beside me.

“With fish,” Toru said, turning to smile at Jiro.

But I knew that Toru had meant with corpses.

I pictured the harbor filled with blood and floating bodies, the boats knocking against what was someone’s father, someone’s daughter.

All of a sudden, I realized Toru was staring at me. I stared back at him. What had he said? Had he said something about my expulsion in front of the whole family?

“I—I haven’t done . . . ,” I stammered.

“He’s pale as rice paste!” Toru said.

“Ah,” my mother said, waving her hand dismissively. “I keep telling him to get up and move around. All he does is lie on his futon—”

But Toru had risen and come to my side. He kneeled, putting his hands on either side of my head, and finally I realized he was not talking about my expulsion at all. He pulled down my lower eyelids with his thumbs and tilted my head back to look into my mouth. Though I had been avoiding him all day, I felt, at his sure touch, an immense relief, and it was with gratitude that I watched him swiftly turn my hands over to inspect my fingernails.

“My God! It’s a wonder you’re sitting upright at all,” he said. “You’re terribly anemic!”

O
NCE AGAIN
I lay on the examining table of Toru’s clinic. His window was now covered with iron bars, and his front door had been reinforced with a chain and a large dead bolt. My arm lay in a modified version of the immobilizing splint he had used to infuse the antivenom into me four years ago.

He moved about the room, setting a bottle of rubbing alcohol on the counter and unwrapping a needle and a syringe. He opened a steel cabinet and pulled out a large bottle of yellow fluid.

“But where did all my blood go?”

He shut the cabinet and twisted the needle onto the syringe, pulling yellow fluid into it from the bottle. “You’re malnourished,” he said. “You’ll need daily treatments.”

As Toru pierced my skin with the needle, I winced. “I thought it was from being sad,” I said.

Toru pulled back on the syringe, and my blood swirled up into the fluid. He pushed it back into me. He moved quickly, preoccupied; a baby wailed in the full waiting room next door. He glanced at me, pushing the fluid into my vein. “You have reason to be sad,” he said. “Many roads are closed to you now.”

I turned my head away from him. I had hoped that he might offer words of comfort or encouragement.

“One thing you need to keep in mind,” Toru said, pressing on my arm as he pulled out the needle. “The people who govern us now value only power. If you want to survive, you need to keep your mouth shut. You will have a more limited life, now that you have been expelled, but at least you are alive. Be grateful, lie low, and keep yourself out of trouble.”

B
E GRATEFUL, LIE LOW.
In the time to follow, I would be grateful for many things. The Mainlander whose mob-induced injuries Toru had treated on February 27 turned out to be the son of Chien Kuo’s middle school principal. The son’s gratitude to Toru was so great that when he returned to the clinic for continuing treatment, he brought gifts, and Toru seized the opportunity to plead my case.

His father agreed that expulsion should really have been his decision as principal, and it was conceivable that Teacher Lee had been unduly influenced by the events of February 28. My punishment was reduced to two black marks, and I was allowed to resume studies at my middle school. This was a great relief to my family, but Teacher Lee was deeply angered and struck me down at every turn. The remainder of my time at Chien Kuo middle school was nothing but misery, and though I won admittance into Chien Kuo’s prestigious high school, out of spite I refused to go.

I
ENROLLED WITH
some elementary school classmates at Provincial Taipei Institute of Technology. This was a junior college, which my classmates convinced me would save me from three miserable years of high school and an additional round of entrance exams. And in fact my life did improve. The teachers at my new school were kind and fair, if not rigorous, and the courses required little study. As I was still weak I did not complain. I was no longer on track to take the American entrance exam, but at least I was in school and I was alive. White banners hung over the train platform every day with the freshly painted names of those who had been executed that day: My classmate’s father, a chemistry professor. My cousin’s friend, a university student. Hundreds of students at Taiwan Normal University and Taiwan University had been arrested, obliterating entire departments. Mothers with drawn faces made the walk to the station every morning to look up at the banners, scanning them for the names of their sons. Had they been killed? Sent to the prison on Hue Sho To, Fire-Burnt Island?