The Third Son (19 page)

His face darkened and he looked at me shrewdly.

“Originally my father ran against the Nationalist Party,” I said. “He ran for the Young China Party when he was mayor. But when he was elected to the Political Council, he became so popular that the Nationalists felt threatened by him and made him switch to the Nationalist Party. They made threats of some kind, I’m sure. He quit his position just before I left home, actually, because of it.”

“Oh?”

“He couldn’t stand all the secret agents and the name-calling. My uncles were absolutely furious, after all the family money he spent on the campaign.”

Hong looked at me sideways for a moment. “What about you? What are your politics?”

“I don’t care about this party or that,” I said. “I just want to be free.”

Hong scratched his head. “Why should I believe you?”

I shrugged. “Why would I make up a story like that? That’s why I came here, to get away from it all.”

“Well, you see now, you haven’t.” He sat back, looking at me, and folded his arms. “When I came to America, I felt I was free, too, and I became so entranced with this sense of freedom that I wished to bring this feeling back to my homeland. So I helped form a local group to discuss Formosan independence, Formosa being the European name, the non-Nationalist name, for our country. These groups are growing here, you understand. Any organization you see that uses the name Formosa is pro-independence.”

“Pro-independence? You mean, independence from China?” I lowered my voice instinctively.

“Of course,” Hong said. “From anyone. Why shouldn’t the Taiwanese rule themselves? Why should we submit to the Mainlanders? Why should we let Western powers decide who rules us or buy into this claim that the Nationalists are the true leaders of China, that the Communist Party is just a temporary problem? This is like saying England is the true leader of the United States. Of course no one says that. Because England lost the war. Well, so did the Nationalists. It’s ridiculous.”

I bit into my cookie and almost gagged, both at the cookie’s sweetness and in alarm at these words, which I had certainly thought to myself but had never dared to speak.

“But,” Hong continued, “the Nationalists are also increasing their presence here. They control every Chinatown.” He looked at me. “They are desperate to suppress the Formosan independence movement here and maintain American support for Chiang Kai-shek, without which they are nothing. This is why I was not so warm to you initially, because I never know who is an agent and who is not. I hope you were not offended.”

I assured him I was not.

“After a while I noticed Kuo-hong appeared everywhere I went. My mail was being opened. I first noticed this when I was helping to arrange a talk at Stanford University by the great political scientist Peng Ming-min.”

A kettle whistled in the kitchen, and we both glanced to the door.

Hong leaned forward, looking at me intently. “I’ve been blacklisted. My wife and my brother have both lost their jobs in Kaohsiung, and though I have a green card, I can’t get them over.”

“Ah!” I exclaimed. “Even in America they do this?”

“They do,” he said. “They cannot do anything directly to me, but they can do all the damage they want at home.”

“Ah!” I sat back, thinking of Yoshiko and Kai-ming on the tarmac, of my promise to her.

“Don’t worry,” he said, seeing my crestfallen face. “Just be careful. Now you know.”

W
E WERE SERVED
cake dusted with pure powdered sugar.

I swallowed, the cake so sweet it stuck in my throat. How had I not suspected that the Nationalists would be here, too? But I smiled politely as Pat and Mary joined us in the white room.

Pat wiped the powder off his lips with a paper napkin. “Now, what’s this I hear about you taking a bus to Michigan?”

I explained about Kazuo’s present.

Pat and Mary looked at each other incredulously.

“You must really love your brother, and love him true,” Mary said.

“Or you’ve offended him in some way.”

“The latter,” I said. My bitterness at seeing Kuo-hong loosened my tongue. “I married the girl he wanted. Also, he can’t come here.”

No one blinked an eye. Perhaps people said things like this all the time in America.

“Why don’t you just send it?” Mary said.

“Could do it,” I said. “But I already have my tickets.”

Hong laughed. “You are a good Chinese boy.”

“You’re crazy!” Mary exclaimed.

Pat watched me for a moment, puffing on his pipe. “I’ll help you book a flight. We’ll just ring up the airline.”

“That is very nice of you,” I said. “I enjoyed my flight here—I even saw the aurora borealis. But now, I look forward to seeing this country.” And, I almost added, I’m not a rich American, like you.

“By—Greyhound?” Mary said uncertainly.

Hong laughed again and patted my arm. The English slowed him down and he paused, formulating his words. “Tell you what. Since you go, meet my friend at University of Michigan. Ni Wen-chong. Shoots rocket into the air, study the atmosphere. Very smart guy, got PhD at University of Illinois, now doing his postdoctorate. You go see him, he’ll take care of you.”

Rockets. Atmosphere.

“Yes.” Hong smiled at my expression. “Since you like turbojets and aurora borealis, perhaps this will interest you?”

“Of course!”

Pat laughed genially. “I think we have a future rocket scientist here.”

“Ni Wen-chong,” Hong said. “And perhaps you could give this to him.” He pulled an envelope out of his pocket. “Going to mail it, but hand delivery will be better, just as your brother says.” He laughed, but his eyes met mine pointedly. “You do it?”

I cannot say that I was in any way naive. I had seen Kuo-hong and known why he was there. I had grown up in a milieu where dissent from the government was expected to bring a sentence of death, and I was the son of a man who would slam the door on his friends and shuffle to the side of the man carrying the biggest stick. Professor Hong represented, for me, the Taoyuan magistrate, the university professors, the young students dragged off to become prisoners or mere inked characters that dripped in the mist above the train station. I should have feared any association with the man. But something shifted in me. Perhaps it was the clean white carpet or the odorless American air, free of any lingering traces of history, or perhaps it was my innate self-righteousness, untying itself from its bonds, for I felt, rising above all else in importance, Hong’s essential goodness, his own righteousness and his rightness. I had worked, fought so hard to get here, because of what Toru had told me while he assaulted the venom that ran through my veins: that America was the land of personal freedom, the land of making your own choices. I was here, and Hong needed help.

And I wanted to meet Ni Wen-chong.

“I’ll do it,” I said. And I took the envelope.

16

I
LOOKED OUT THE
window. For a moment I saw my eyes reflected back, as wide and watchful as they had been when I fished in the paddies. And then the suspension wires of the Bay Bridge whipped past, the soaring towers anchored unfathomably deep in the bay’s muddy bottom. I stared, knowing I might never see these sights again: the San Joaquin Valley with its neat rectangles of green, its vineyards and cotton fields stretching in straight lines to the base of the Sierra; the conifer-studded shoulders of the Sierra Nevada; and then, plunging down, the arid monotony of the Nevada desert, punctuated only by cacti, their arms raised in perpetual salute. If I scoured these landscapes I might find the secret to succeeding in America, the secret to getting a master’s degree in electrical engineering in half a year. I had not even told Yoshiko the conditions of my year’s funding. To get the money from the family, my father had promised his brothers that I would study pharmacy after one semester of electrical engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines. Taikong had no need for an electrical engineer, and my uncles had no desire to indulge my personal aspirations. They had spent enough money on my father’s political campaign. And unfortunately I had received a scholarship to an undergraduate pharmacy program at Baylor, and no scholarship to the School of Mines.

“Reno!” The bus brakes screeched, and the driver, tossing on his stately-looking cap, jumped off the bus. The other passengers jumped off behind him and hurried after his lanky receding figure into the squat building by the highway. I assumed they were after the restrooms, as the bathroom on the bus—very impressive to me, as I had never seen one—was somewhat cramped and unpleasant smelling.

I stepped off the bus, wishing I had not skipped the restroom at Truckee. But it was not the restroom that had everyone running.

In the building’s darkened interior, our lithe and otherwise respectable bus driver leaned on a long silver handle. With his other hand, he fed quarter after quarter into a machine with spinning cartoon drawings of fruit. The quarters glinted in the dim light, each one representing the equivalent of my daily wage at Taikong. Behind the driver, the passengers waited, peering over his shoulders, hands jangling their own quarters in their pockets, waiting to pour them into the machine, too. It made me ill to watch and to hear each quarter drop into the machine. I walked away. I actually did need to use the restroom.

At the ticket counter, a man in a Greyhound uniform slouched over an issue of
Life
. Extralong hair from the back of his head was brushed over a bald patch on his crown.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

He gestured, not looking. “There.”

“Yes,” I said. “But one sign says ‘Whites Only’ and one says ‘Colored.’ ”

He glanced up briefly at my face. “Use the white bathroom. The other one’s for niggers.”

He returned to his magazine.

I watched him turn the page, casually, confident in his prejudice. It was universal: my people, the descendants of Han Chinese, had been suppressed on Taiwan by the Spanish, the Dutch, the Japanese, and the Mainland Chinese. We in turn suppressed the Hakka minority and the aborigines. And yet, walking into the bleach-scented white bathroom, I was amazed to think that a person might not even be allowed to enter a bathroom because of his race, that no amount of antiseptic could scrub away the traces of a man’s trespass there enough to satisfy a white man’s delicate sensibilities.

We crossed the Utah border into a tortuous landscape as red and alien as any scene from science fiction. And I caught my first, albeit distant, glimpse of snow on the peaks of the Rockies, so barren and angular compared to the lush mountains of my homeland, as we wove between them.

We stopped at Post House restaurants with log-cabin facades and cafeteria-style interiors. I shuffled through the line, bending my ear close as the person in front of me ordered and repeating the same words when I was asked.
Cheeseburger with fries. T-bone steak. Pork chop with mashed potatoes.

My stomach churned at the fatty aromas and the unaccustomed surplus of protein, and I thought guiltily of Yoshiko having steamed bread and rice porridge with the vegetables she’d pickled herself.

The food servers squinted at me, though I spoke as clearly as I had with Pat and Mary. One man frowned and threw his spatula down. “I’m not serving a gook.”

“Huh?”

His coworker stepped forward and said to me, “Sorry, sir, he’s a vet. I’ll get that for you. You want coffee with that?”

“No.” Coffee cost a nickel, the equivalent of a bowl of noodles and a steamer of
shio mai
on Gongyuan Road.

For days we traveled, and I saw neither the answers I sought in the landscapes hurtling by nor any Asian face but the reflection of my own greasy, yawning visage in the window. I began missing my own bed and Yoshiko’s soft embrace within it. Kai-ming could have learned to roll over by now.

Somewhere in the Nebraskan plains, the endless sitting began to exacerbate the pain in my back, and I moved the plush reclining seat back and forth every few minutes, trying to get comfortable. I was still eager to see Ann Arbor and the school too mighty to admit me. But what an obliging fool I was, to deliver Kazuo’s present by hand! Were it not for the promise of meeting Ni Wen-chong, I might well have taken a bus in the reverse direction.

By Lincoln, I was more resentful than not. By the rest stop in Omaha, I was convinced that Kazuo had known full well what he had asked me to do, and by Des Moines I knew for certain that Kazuo had consulted a map of the United States and planned this detour for me as revenge for his having lost Yoshiko.

17

I
DRAGGED MY SUITCASES
onto the wet sidewalk of West Huron Street in front of the Ann Arbor Greyhound depot. The air was cool but fresh, smelling of wet earth, and I breathed it in gratefully after a week confined to the staleness of the bus.

In contrast to San Francisco, Chicago, and many cities in between, Ann Arbor was quite small and quiet, with low buildings and large maple trees lining the road, branches newly budded and shivering in the gray drizzle. Cars were plentiful, the reflection of their rounded noses slipping calmly over the curved surfaces of the windows flanking me. We were near Detroit, and I had no doubt that this area benefited from its proximity to the car-manufacturing center of the world.