The Third Son (16 page)

Through the days, I worried—about failing, and about passing. There was the issue of leaving my new wife and baby. There was also a practical, monetary hurdle. Before I would even be allowed to leave the country, I would have to demonstrate to the government that I had enough cash to survive a year in America. Namely, twenty-five-hundred American dollars, or a hundred thousand NT.

“Where am I going to come up with that!” I said, looking up at the ceiling in the dark.

Yoshiko laid her hand on my chest. Moonlight shone on her cheek, the closed lids of her eyes, as her head turned drowsily toward me on her pillow. “Go to sleep,” she said. “You have the richest family in Taoyuan.”

But my stomach growled, long done digesting my meager dinner, and I knew never to assume I would get what I needed from my family.

14

T
HROUGH THE TRAIN’S WINDOW
I watched: the sky lightening behind a double-peaked mountain on Taiwan’s northeastern coast; light shooting down the mountain’s terraced shoulder and onto the sugarcane fields below. The sun rose, its rays stretching across the plains, and the rice paddies glinted as we curved into the explosive manmade growth of Taipei City.

I jumped off the train and rushed through the streets. They were framed densely with store signs on either side, characters stacked one on top of the other, three stories high. Above my head, Nationalist flags flapped from wires extending from one side of the street to the other. On the sidewalk, street carts steamed with sweet soybean soup and
you tiao.

It was an hour before the exam, and already a crowd of jittery young men had gathered on the steps of the civic auditorium. I glanced up at the massive building. The Settlement Committee, including my father’s friend the Taoyuan magistrate, had met here after the February 28 Incident to draw up and present their demands for democratic reform to Governor Chen Yi.

My stomach churned with nervous energy as I snaked my way up through the crowd, climbing two stairs at a time.

“Hey! Our whole study group! All going to MIT, right?”

Toward the top of the stairs, a plump young man in a leather jacket smiled at his circle of buddies and raised his hand. It was Kazuo’s friend Li-wen, from the Anti-Communist Youth Corps. “I’ll go to California Tech,” he was saying. “I like the warm weather.”

His friends laughed.

I turned away. No one in my family, including Kazuo, knew I was taking this exam. The last thing I wanted was for Kazuo to find out and ridicule me if I failed. I tried to move away through the thick crowd. It was growing by the minute and I could smell the different brands of soap and pomade. I crouched down and angled myself behind a chubby young man with a pompadour.

Li-wen’s jacket squeaked as he tapped his forehead. “I’ve calculated it. They pass about one in five thousand, and there are two thousand at this site, so that means half a person here will make it to America. The question is, will it be the top half or the bottom half?” He punched the bony arm of the student next to him. “Or Professor here. He’s about half a person!”

The group erupted in laughter, jostling their friend, the Professor, who smiled quietly and pushed his heavy glasses up his nose. The pompadour shifted slightly, opening a direct line of sight between me and Li-wen.

Our eyes met for a split second before I hastily turned away. “Eh!” Li-wen said, and he pointed to me. “Eh! Aren’t you Kazuo’s little brother?” Li-wen chuckled. “The one who went to Taipei Provincial Tech? I can’t wait to tell Kazuo you were here!
He
hasn’t even dared take the exam, and here
you
are.”

I felt my cheeks grow hot.

Li-wen laughed. “Do yourself a favor, little brother. Go home to your sexy wife.” He turned to his group. “This boy improves our statistics. We forget who our competition is.

“Eh,” he called again to me. “I’m curious. How are the English courses at Taipei Provincial Tech?”

I heard someone snicker. I watched Li-wen’s face, pudgy with rice cakes and pork dumplings. This was not the face of a man who would succeed in the New World. Above the sneering mouth, the eyes were small, dim, and afraid.

I stood up straight and pushed forward to face him. Toru’s shots had made me a head taller than the other men. The laughter trailed off, and I spoke in English. “If I were to go to America, I would not have to worry about people like you standing in my way,” I said.

The group looked among themselves for a moment. One of them nudged the Professor, but he shook his head.

Li-wen tilted his head to the side and raised his eyebrows. “Nice use of the subjunctive, little brother,” he said. “My friends, this boy has been rehearsing that line for a week.”

The group laughed again, and I turned away, heart charging.

A hand touched my arm and spoke quietly. “Good luck, little brother.”

But I did not look back to see who wished me well. The doors to the building were opening, and I pressed up the stairs to go through them.

You wasted your life!

I found my chair and sat tall—tall as a cowboy poised atop his horse on the prairie, strong as George Washington’s gaze carved in South Dakotan granite.

Stupid boy!

I shook my head and breathed deeply, blocking out the persistent needling of my self-doubt, the rustling pages around me, the click-clacking of hundreds of shoes sticking to and releasing from the tacky floorboards. I would work slowly and carefully, pacing myself as I would for a long-distance race. Steady as the wind over the Taiwan Strait. Rhythmic as Fred Astaire in a fox-trot.

I forced the cacophonous images from my mind. My pencil made strong strokes on the paper. I calculated the area under a curve, the speed of a falling rocket as it entered the atmosphere. My heart flip-flopped as I saw that the reading passages were not textbook English but culled from
Life
magazine and the
New York Times
. Thank goodness I had gone through the trouble of parsing all those sentences about Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips and Spencer Tracy’s Catholic upbringing. Two rows down from me, the Professor scratched his ear and pushed his glasses up his nose with a quick, repetitive movement.

In the same hall where a plea for democratic representation had ended in massacre, my pencil moved, deliberate and unstoppable as a locomotive, across the paper.

I can go.

I will go.

I’ll go to the United States of America.

A
FEW WEEKS
later, I tried to stop Yoshiko from jumping up and down on the train platform.

“The baby! Remember the baby!” I said. And I hugged her tight. Her body shook against mine, and I didn’t know whether she was crying or laughing.

A little crowd had gathered. There was a banner overhead, white with black lettering.

“Has someone been executed?” I heard someone ask.

“No, it’s the examination results, rice-for-brains.”

I reread the banner. It said
TAO-YUAN COUNTY: TONG CHIA-LIN
.

Yoshiko laughed against my neck. “See! I knew you could do it!”

I clutched her tightly, feeling her breaths, quick and shallow, and her belly, swollen with new life’s promise. For the first time ever, the world felt open to me, boundless. I could open my arms and jump into the sky. I could fly across the Pacific Ocean with one beat of my wings, the sun warming my back.

“I’m going to America,” I said, amazed.

Yoshiko laughed, and I touched the fragrant softness of her hair. And then, in spite of winning the two things that I had longed for all my life—Yoshiko and my ticket to America—I despaired. In proving myself to Yoshiko, I was also abandoning her. I closed my eyes, clutching her hair, her body, still slight despite her pregnancy. How could I leave? How could I?

To my surprise, she pulled out of my grasp. She looked up at me, her eyes sparkling and ferocious.

“What is it?” I said.

“Do well in America,” she said. “And bring me over, too.”

I stared at her. “What about your family?”

“They’ll survive. You are my family now,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

“We’ll talk about it. I have plans. I could teach at the university—”

“Bring me over,” she said. “Please. I’ve thought about it. I’ve seen how your family treats you. We’ll have a better life. We’ll be free—” She glanced around at the train platform, at the white banner flapping in the wind.

And though I had no idea how I would do it, I agreed.

“I will,” I said. “I promise.”

Part 2

1957–1962

15

I
POSED ON THE
tarmac with Yoshiko, who held our eight-week-old son, Kai-ming. Together with my parents, my brothers and sisters, and several of my uncles, we stood silently in the light wind while the photographer shouted directions over the plane’s roaring behind us. My family’s pride in my passage to America—their announcements to friends, their hiring of Taoyuan’s best, or at least most expensive, photographer—had surprised me. Even Kazuo, to my great shock, had congratulated me while I was packing. He had done so while handing me a very large, heavy package, which I had initially thought was a gift for me.

“What’s this?” I looked down at the address scrawled on the paper. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I had been rejected from that school, and I was confused for a moment, thinking Kazuo had forgotten where I was actually going.

“Oh, it’s for a friend of mine. Would you mind hand-delivering it?”

“It’s so heavy,” I said. “Couldn’t you send it?”

“It’s not as special if you send it. And it might break. Eh,” he said, slapping me on the back. “I guess that little Japanese
sensei
was right about you, little brother. You’re on your way to the land paved with gold. You’ll be the richest man in Taoyuan.”

Kazuo’s package was stuffed into one of my two suitcases, making the suitcase vastly overweight and costing me a tremendous amount in fines. My noting that it would have cost less to send the package by freight released a torrent of nasty words from my mother.
Your big brother asks you to do something, and all you do is complain . . .

“One more!” the photographer called out.

Kai-ming struggled against his swaddling blankets and cried, pressing his fists against Yoshiko’s breast. He was a sickly child, and Yoshiko had been unable to nurse him. In the bend of his tiny elbow lay a crumpled bandage from Toru’s latest infusion. What worked for the father would work for the son. I needed to believe it.

The plane’s engine started up with a grinding roar, and Kai-ming startled, turning his head to look beyond his mother’s arms. Despite his ill health he was an unusually alert child, his eyes focusing almost from birth. Perhaps it would have been better if he were less aware. I touched his tiny hand and he looked at me with what seemed to be reproach. And then he snorted several times and erupted in cries.

“Don’t worry,” Yoshiko said. “You’ll see your papa again soon.”

Yoshiko deftly adjusted his blanket and rocked him, humming. She was a natural mother, and next to her I felt clumsy and incompetent. She and Kai-ming were already bonded in a way I could not even comprehend. I wondered sometimes whether Yoshiko had purposely made me superfluous to my son’s needs. Yet when the plane’s roaring increased, the unnaturalness of leaving my infant son hit me full force. I touched the side of his face, so soft and tender. I wouldn’t touch him again for a year.

“You’d better go,” Yoshiko said. The delicate skin around her eyes was drawn with sadness and fatigue. Kai-ming had been up all night with diarrhea. We had had to take him to Toru’s clinic before dawn. I felt in my pocket for the piece of paper Toru had given me, the address of his old math teacher, who now lived in Chicago as a gardener.

“I can’t leave you,” I said.

“Of course you can. We’ll be fine.”

“He’s sick. I’m supposed to take care of him. I’m supposed to take care of you. I—” I promised, I was going to say as I had before, not to be like your father, not to abandon my son to his deathbed. But she already knew what I was going to say and she interrupted.

“We have Toru. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not ready.”

“Of course you are. You’re better prepared than anyone has ever been. Who else would go practice English with all those American nuns and missionaries?”

“But I mean, he’s crying—”

“He’s always crying.” She bounced him back and forth, her polka-dot dress swaying. Even with a newborn she wore heels and silk. “Get on the plane. You worked your whole life for this.” She bit her lip, tears welling in her eyes. “You take care of us by getting on that plane.”

I could hardly bear to see her like this—Yoshiko, so fiercely independent, reduced to relying on me. She had hoped to find another job for the fall, but my mother would not hear of it. My mother claimed she would lose face if it appeared that her daughter-in-law needed to work, but I noticed my mother’s face softening when she and Yoshiko chatted at home, and I knew she also wanted my wife at home for company.