The Third Son (9 page)

About twenty thousand people died during that time, the White Terror. Taiwanese, aborigine, and Mainlanders, too. “Communist sympathizers,” they were called. I was lucky I had a father savvy enough to keep me alive.

Toru continued my daily infusions. My family’s company, Taikong, was branching into pharmaceuticals, so my parents got the yellow fluid free of charge. Sixty milliliters of vitamins—B
₆
, B
₁₂
, C, glucose, and who knows what else—every day for months without end. My veins shrank from the assault, burrowing deep into my flesh and making each needle stick more excruciating. The very sight of Toru’s office made me sick.

8

W
HAT DOES ‘REFORM’ MEAN,
Otosan
?” Jiro asked. “They keep talking about it on the radio.”

We were in our jeep, on our way back from a meeting at my uncle’s house in Taipei. My father and his brothers met every few months to discuss their finances, which were all joined together. My father sat in the front seat, between our driver and Kazuo.

“ ‘Reform,’ ” my father said, folding his arms, “means that Chiang Kai-shek wants the United States to send him more money. It means he is trying to make the world forget about the many thousands of people he has killed since February twenty-eighth and all the American dollars he wasted when he failed to beat the Communists.”

“But things are better now, right?” Jiro said. “Since Chiang Kai-shek came here? He killed Governor Chen Yi, right?”

“
Tyo,
” my father said. “He killed his friend after he realized it didn’t look good to the West that he was being rewarded. And once he had a replacement who went to Princeton University, in America.”

The jeep slowed to a stop as we passed through downtown Taoyuan. American jazz drifted through the jeep’s open windows from a record store.

“Governor Wu Kuo-chen,” Kazuo pronounced, adopting our father’s scornful air. The folds of fat on the back of his neck bunched up as he turned his head to address us over his shoulder. “His new cabinet is mostly Taiwanese. But it’s just for show—”

“
Shh,
stupid! There are soldiers there!” my father growled under his breath.

Kazuo looked wounded and glanced out the window. Just a few feet away, outside a barbershop, two Nationalist soldiers stood in their familiar uniforms, smoking cigarettes and chatting. The jeep rumbled under our seats, and we all looked forward, silent, pretending we knew nothing of February 28, the White Terror, or any need of reform.

T
HE MOLECULES FROM
the yellow bag swirled through my blood, reinforcing the scaffolding of my bones and the marrow within them. My cells feasted, divided, and grew. I grew tall—taller than my brothers, taller than my father, my legs so long they earned me the new moniker Horse when I joined the school’s track team.

Toru gradually decreased the frequency of my injections to once a month, to three times a year, and then discontinued them entirely. I was able to eat more now because my mother gave me money for my train fare to junior college. Most days I did ride the train, stumbling about in a blue cattle car with my classmates, commuters, and farmers carrying goats, chickens, and baskets of eggplant to the market. But when I could, I sat on the back of a friend’s motorcycle and used my train fare to buy spare-rib soup or oyster omelettes, slurping the food quickly in front of a stall on Gongyuan Road. It was not much food, not nearly as much as I would have liked, but it was enough to sustain the production of my blood.

I
N MY FINAL
year at junior college, before my mandatory military service year, I hitched a ride home with my classmate, Yi-yang. I’d rapidly become the school’s track star, and suddenly I was surrounded by friends. Yi-yang, with his easy smile and impish attempts to introduce fun into my life, was one of my best ones.

I hadn’t been paying attention while we rode, and realized he had stopped his motorcycle on Chungcheng Road. “I thought you were taking me home,” I said. It was Friday. Kazuo would be coming home from medical school for the weekend, as he usually did. I had taken to borrowing
Fundamentals of the English Language for Foreigners
from his bookshelf during the week. I had finally discovered certain tricks to help me study. I wrote things down and quizzed myself forward and backward—even upside down, like a game. I listened to Glenn Miller on a radio I’d put together in class. The music, paradoxically, helped me focus on my work and made it so much less dreary that I began thinking I might make a living building and refurbishing radios. And since I finally had a handle on studying, I couldn’t resist the temptation to learn English. But Kazuo’s book was still in my bag and not where it belonged, on his shelf. I needed to get it back fast.

Yi-yang looked back at me slyly. “There’s Wen-shen. Let’s see what he’s up to.”

He waved to our classmate Wen-shen, and we crossed the street, Yi-yang pushing his motorcycle along in neutral. We had just learned about fuel cells at school, and as we walked I listened to the motorcycle’s purring, its controlled, compartmentalized fire. We dodged people walking, riding bicycles, hauling rickshaws. Despite the political oppression, Taoyuan, and Taiwan as a whole, was booming. The buildings along the street shot skyward, fueled by our economy, which had recovered—depending on whom you spoke to—either because of the Nationalist’s Land to the Tiller Act, which had given my grandfather’s hard-earned hectares to the farmers he had hired to farm them, or because of the restoration of our already robust Japanese infrastructure. There was so much scaffolding on the buildings along the street that people could hardly walk down the sidewalk. Each story was different from the one below, with larger windows and squarer construction, like an upside-down mountain terraced with rice paddies. Workers in conical straw hats climbed through the scaffolding, hammering above our heads.

We reached Wen-shen, a stocky young man with a disproportionately big head, and he smiled.

“Need some medicine?” Yi-yang said.

Wen-shen giggled, smoothing his shirtfront.

Yi-yang laughed, turning red, and glanced at me. “Come on, Tong, we’ll show you the prettiest girl in Taoyuan.”

“Oh no,” I said. “Another of your schemes.” Kazuo’s book banged against my side through my bag. “I have to get home. I’ve got to”—I thought quickly—“I’ve got to practice for the meet tomorrow.”

“I know, Saburo,” Yi-yang said. “You’re in love with that florist girl.”

“Oh no.” I looked away, embarrassed. Being an athlete had also attracted attention from girls, and there was one, a very pretty girl with a delicate chin, that I had been on a few dates with.

“What?” said Wen-shen. “Are you engaged?”

“
Bou-la,
” I said. “I’m not seeing that girl anymore.”

“Why not?”

“She was always giggling,” I said. Actually, the headiness that I had felt, watching the pretty girl laugh and flash her eyes at me, had not survived the excruciatingly painful silences that occurred when her laughing stopped. I had tried talking, asking her questions, but every story I told seemed to fall into a bottomless hole, and everything she said was prefaced by “My friend, Bu-chi, says . . . ” I simply couldn’t endure it any longer.

“Well, then, come. This one’s not giggly at all. And don’t give me that excuse about your meet. You shouldn’t tire yourself out the night before a big race.” Yi-yang indicated for me to follow and blithely pushed his motorcycle up the wrong side of Chungcheng Road. “You’ll like her, you’ll see. She goes to a business school in Taipei. We followed her home on Tuesday.”

“You’re stalking the girl?”

“Tong Chia-lin,” Wen-shen said, “how else can you know where a girl lives? Will you just walk up to her and ask her address?” He turned to Yi-yang with mock concern. “You need to teach Saburo here, or he’ll end up arranged to marry some ugly woman with a big bank account.” They erupted in laughter.

We crossed Fushing Road. It was a brilliant day, and the winter winds had subsided into a mild breeze. The crowd bustled, women carrying baskets of
nappa
and
ku tsai,
bags of rice noodles, bolts of striped or brightly flowered cotton. We passed a grocery store, the sweet smell of cloves and allspice wafting into the street.

I envied my friends’ lightheartedness. Mine had gone long ago, flying out the window of my middle school and splashing into the lotus ponds in the botanical gardens beyond.

We stopped just past Jin-fu Temple in front of a small, glass-fronted pharmacy.

“
Hou,
” Wen-shen said. “Time to get some aspirin. Foreign, you know.” He winked at me. “Should take her some time to find it.”

They headed for the door. I hesitated. “I’ll watch your motorbike,” I said.

As soon as the door closed behind them, I wished I had not offered to watch the motorcycle. Kazuo’s train would be coming in anytime now, and I needed to slip his book back on the shelf. Why hadn’t I done it last night? I did not normally cut it this close, but I was down to the last chapter of the book and had thought I could finish it on the train.

I stood on the sidewalk, looking up and down the street at the throngs of bicycles. I couldn’t help feeling like a fool. I should have either gone in with my friends and had a good time or gone home. I glanced through the glass front of the pharmacy. Behind the counter, a girl with short styled hair, a plain white blouse, and a navy-blue skirt deftly counted out pills and then lifted her head to answer a question. Now I knew why my friends had taken the trouble to follow her home from Taipei. Her eyes sparkled, offset by skin whiter than ivory. When she smiled, she covered her mouth demurely, not obscuring dimples on either cheek. Though she wasn’t tall, she moved about the pharmacy with a proper, swift grace. She paused at times over the abacus, keeping her back straight and inclining her head gently over her flying hands like a Japanese koto player. She was not all sweetness; in moments when she was not directly talking to customers, her face drew quiet and sad. She plunked certain medication bottles down with an air of impatience, and at a word from a sullen young man unpacking boxes behind the counter beside her, she frowned. But her frankness only made it more breathtaking when she did smile. I watched, dazzled by the transparent display of emotions on her face. She dispensed medication to others, but her face alone was a balm for wounds. She was a woman, and any residual thoughts I had about the tiresome florist girl blew away like so many petals in the wind.

“Here to gawk?”

I whipped around at the sound of Kazuo’s voice. He stood facing me, his thick lips pressed together in a smirk. His belly swelled over the waistband of his dress pants. At his side, his pompous, plump-faced friend Li-wen caressed the leather collar of his jacket. Li-wen was a member of the Anti-Communist Youth Corps, an instrument of the Nationalists.

“I’m waiting here for my friends,” I said.

The pharmacy door opened, and Wen-shen and Yi-yang burst into the street, looking sheepish. Their smiles vanished as Kazuo brushed by them and took hold of the door.

“You’re wasting your time,” Kazuo said to them. “You think a girl like that wants an electrician from a vocational school? You think she wants to help you sell radios?” He looked at me pointedly.

I felt a surge of anger and helplessness. Because I knew he was right.

“
Hou lai tsao,
” Yi-Yang said to me quietly. Let’s go.

“Some girls don’t care about things like that,” I said.

“Smart girls do,” Kazuo said. “And I happen to know, that girl is smart. All I had to do was tell her I was a student at the top medical school on Taiwan and the oldest son of the new mayor, and—”

“What’s your business here?” The sullen-looking young man who had been behind the counter was now in the doorway. He looked around at us, his eyes sharp and unpleasant.

“Who are you?” Kazuo said.

“I’m ‘that girl’s’ brother. You all are clogging up our store.”

“What a pleasure to meet you,” Kazuo said, his voice unctuous. “I’m Mayor Tong’s son. Li-hsiang answered my letter and asked me to meet her here. And this is my friend Li-wen, a high-ranking member of the Anti-Communist Youth Corps.”

The girl’s brother looked shrewdly at Kazuo and Li-wen and stepped aside. The door closed after them.

“I can’t believe it!” Yi-yang exclaimed. “No offense to you, Saburo, but that girl has poor taste. Your brother’s an ass.”

“What happened when you went in?”

They giggled. “Great plan!” Yi-yang said. “He asked for aspirin, and she put the bottle on the counter before he could finish his sentence.”

“And then,” Wen-shen said incredulously, “she charged me a dollar!”

“For one bottle of aspirin?” I said. “That’s about four times what it should be!”

“I know,” said Wen-shen.

“Look!” Yi-yang said. “Your brother’s talking to her.”

We pressed in at the window. Kazuo stood at the counter, bumping it nervously with his stomach as he spoke, gesticulating with his hands. The girl watched him, head inclined slightly, looking up at him with a wary expression. Her gaze flickered over to where we watched. In a shaft of sunlight from the window her eyes sparkled, flecked with gold.