The Third Son (5 page)

My teachers had taught us all the good things the Japanese had done for Taiwan. They had built our schools, our airfields, the rail lines stretching north to Keelung and south all the way to Kaohsiung. They had even let the Taiwanese people elect local representatives. Representatives like my father.

My father grunted and shifted in his armchair when we asked him these questions after a particularly breathless radio commentary about Chiang Kai-shek. “Only at the end did the Japanese let us do these things. At the beginning they squashed us down like bugs. Tens of thousands of Taiwanese. Like this.” He drew his finger across his throat and pointed to our family altar, where incense smoldered in a small pot before a scroll of our family tree. “Our ancestors are from China. Never forget it. Japan and China have been warring for many years. In 1895, Japan defeated China and got Taiwan. Now, with this American bomb, Japan has lost the war and lost Taiwan. We are going back to the Chinese, and people will always be glad to be ruled by their own kind. This is why everyone celebrates.” He paused, frowning into the distance.

“But the situation is more complicated than many people realize. It is not just any Chinese who come to rule us, but the Nationalists, and they are not coming here because they want to,” he said. “They are coming in defeat.”

“I thought you said they beat Japan,” I said. Kazuo snickered behind me.

“China is split,” my father said impatiently. “The Nationalists have ruled for a short time and the Communists are rising and decimating the Nationalist power base. The Communists and the Nationalists fought off the Japanese together but were also fighting each other, and the Communists are winning. Chiang Kai-shek is almost done for. But the Americans support him. They dislike Communism, and that is why, though the Nationalists are losing control of China, they get us as a booby prize.”

He took a couple of puffs on his cigarette. “And so the losers get the sweet potato,” he said, referring, as we all did, to Taiwan’s tuber-like shape, “and we welcome them with open arms.”

I
STUFFED MY
book into my rucksack and hurried outside, where the whole family except for my father was piled into the bed of a delivery truck.

I climbed in and squeezed between Jiro and my younger sister Mariko on the metal bed. I felt a pull on my rucksack. “What are you doing with that?” Kazuo said from behind me. “It’s dirtying my trousers.”

I yanked it back and curled my arm around it. Jiro moved over to make room. He looked at me. He had grown bigger, like me, nearly as tall as our mother, but his eyes were still fearful as a little boy’s. “Why are we going to see the soldiers? They’re so loud.”

Their march, he meant. The only army we knew was the Japanese imperial army, whose synchronized march was so loud and terrifying that the streets would empty long before any soldier was visible. We naturally assumed the Chinese army would be the same.

“A parade!” my father scoffed. “We fought the Japanese when they came. People weren’t stupid then.” I looked to the side of the truck, where my father approached the cab with the Taoyuan magistrate, a thin man who wore black glasses and a friendly smile. He had been a leader of the Home Rule Association under the Japanese.

“Come, old man,” the magistrate said. “For so many years we have dreamed of this moment. Celebrate.”

“We have dreamed of the Japanese leaving, not of the Chinese Nationalists coming. Don’t you wonder why they were so unpopular in China?”

The magistrate laughed, his thin face creased deeply around his mouth as he opened the cab door and clapped my father on the back. “Such a man! Don’t worry. The Chinese are our brethren. Even the Japanese were beginning to concede to our demands.”

“Yes.” My father’s face was dark and mirthless as he shrugged off the magistrate’s hand. “But Chiang Kai-shek is a general, not a monk. He won the whole of China before he lost it to the Communists. And he did not win it by asking politely.”

My father slammed the door shut, and the magistrate, smiling and shaking his head, walked around to climb into the driver’s seat. The windows were open and my father’s voice carried through the air.

“Think,” he said. “Chiang’s Nationalists have been brutalized not only by the Communists but also by the Japanese, and here we drink sake and sleep on tatami. The West has given Taiwan to the Nationalists to punish Japan, not because Chiang Kai-shek loves us.”

The truck started up, and my father’s words rose over the roaring of the engine.

“Only a child believes his rulers have his best interest at heart,” he said. “We would be wise to disabuse ourselves of such illusions.”

W
E WERE UNLOADED
onto a set of tiered platforms in the downtown section of Chungcheng Road, with my father joining the magistrate and members of the town assembly at the top. There were three chairs sitting on the lower platform where my brothers and sisters had been deposited, and they quickly busied themselves squabbling over whether the oldest or the youngest should get to sit. Only Jiro stood looking down the street, a fearful expression on his face.

I looked down over the crowd standing on the sidewalk around us. The populace of Taoyuan lined either side of the street, waving red-and-blue Nationalist flags and scarlet banners saying
WELCOME, GENERALISSIMO CHIANG
! Though in fact only Governor Chen Yi and his troops were coming today.

And then I saw Yoshiko.

She was standing on the other side of Chungcheng Road at the front of a crowd, all of whom were peering down the street for their first glimpse of the Nationalist Chinese soldiers. Her face was obscured by the wide brim of a hat trimmed with blue ribbons, but I could tell it was her by the way she stood—feet together, inclining her head with a polite, expectant air—and the way she held, on one side, her brother’s hand, and on the other side what I took to be her father’s. The three of them were easily among the handsomest and most finely dressed of the crowd. Her father was slim and dapper in an elegant, well-tailored suit with a silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. His teeth flashed with a smile as he bent to talk to Yoshiko. Her brother was a young man now, as tall and handsome as his father, laughing and patting Yoshiko on the head as she pointed down the road. Yoshiko’s white dress, trimmed with blue ribbons to match her hat, billowed out into her brother’s fine dress pants in the light breeze.

“Oh, look!” I heard a man near me say to his friend. “There’s Frog Face with his daughter.”

“The guy who owns the Tiger Café? With that girl in the white?”

“I don’t see his wife—”

They chuckled together.

I wanted so much to talk to Yoshiko. Had she seen the world? Was she no longer poor? I jumped down from the platform onto the sidewalk.

Gasps and quiet cries of surprise arose around me, and I caught my breath. Had I done something wrong? I looked around in alarm, but no one was paying attention to me. They were straining to look at something in the street, and in the general commotion I squeezed through the dress suits, the lace-trimmed sleeves, the embroidered silk cheongsams from Shanghai, and the traditional Chinese dress robes released from decades of storage and emerged at the front of the crowd.

There was no question of crossing the street to get to Yoshiko; groups of bedraggled men now strolled down the road, pots and pans dangling from yokes around their necks. Cooks or servants for the soldiers, I thought. The men were gaunt, their clothes faded, with sloppy white stitches meandering across holes they had clearly tried to mend themselves. Seeing loose chickens in the street, they lunged after them, pots and pans clanging together.

A chicken scampered between my legs, and I leaped back, falling onto the dusty road. A man stepped on my toes with his boot and nearly hit me in the face with a frying pan.

I scrambled to get up, but when I did, I held an upside-down, empty rucksack, and the man who had given chase to the chicken was holding
The Earth.

“My book!” I yelled at the ragged man.

“Be quiet, young man!” someone whispered behind me. “He’s a soldier.”

“A soldier?” I stared at the man’s rotten teeth, his hollow cheeks. This could not possibly be a soldier. Soldiers were terrifying men who wore crisp uniforms and marched in formation. They might demand a chicken, but they would never stoop so low as to chase one in the street.

The man did not hear me, and if he had, he most certainly would not have understood me, as he was shouting and pointing at my book in a language I had never heard. His words swooped and chopped, his face grew red, and he waved my precious book in the air, marking the cover with his dirty thumb.

“It’s mine,” I said, reaching for the book.

He struck my hand back and grabbed me by the arm. He smelled like the goats on the farm near my parents’ country house. I heard him say something that sounded like “
Fujian ren,
” and he dragged me into the street where the rest of the men still ambled by.

“Ow!” I struggled to loosen his grip on my arm.

The man waved down another man who wore no yoke around his neck and appeared of higher rank. I felt a shock as I realized that this actually was an army and that this second man was an officer.

This officer bent down to me, his hollow-cheeked mouth forming words that were comprehensibly Taiwanese, though with a very odd accent. I would understand later that he must have been from the province of our ancestors, Fujian.

“What is your name? Why do you have a Japanese book?”

I began to shake. I had never been face-to-face with a soldier. I had always run from the Japanese soldiers, like everyone else. Any kind of contact with a soldier was sure to bring dire consequences.

“My name,” I said, my mouth sticking together, “is Sa—”

“His name is Tong Chia-lin.” My father pulled up at my side, his jacket unbuttoned to reveal his ever-present bow tie and the expanse of shirt over his belly. His eyes were cold and fearless. I had never heard the name he had just called me, ever. I looked up at him in amazement.

The soldier straightened up, chastised by my father’s aura of authority. “You’re his father?”

“I am,” my father said, and he glanced at me in a way that made it clear he was not entirely happy about that fact.

“Excuse me, Mr. Tong, but a soldier in my troop found your boy hiding this book.” He held up
The Earth.

“Sir,” my father said. There was just the faintest trace of derisiveness in his tone that only those who knew him well would recognize. “That is a textbook. We have been occupied by Japan for fifty years and all our textbooks are in Japanese.”

The officer looked down at the book. He opened it and looked down with disgust at the mixture of kanji and hiragana. “What if I don’t believe you?” he said. He turned the page, and there was an illustration of the solar system.

“You see?” My father pointed at the picture and, at the same time, deftly dropped a small red envelope—the kind people used for New Year’s money—on top of it. “The solar system.”

The officer quickly pocketed the envelope and closed the book with a snap. “I see that it is a textbook. You may keep it. Forgive my mistake.”

As my father’s hand closed around the book, relief and gratitude flooded through me. I reached for the book. “
Otosan!
”

In the same instant that I cried out, the soldier was called away, hurrying after the last of the soldiers. The crowd, silent and shocked by the parade of bedraggled soldiers, began dispersing, their welcome banners slack.

My father whirled to face me, bending so his face was close to mine, his eyes menacing. “Fool!” he whispered. “Don’t you ever talk to me in Japanese in public again. In front of a Nationalist soldier!” He tucked the book under his arm and grabbed my elbow. “I will burn this stupid book when we get home!”

“No!”

He dragged me back to the truck, his fingertips digging so hard into my arm that my eyes watered and I knew there would be marks for days.

Why my one book? Our house was filled with Japanese books. They were on every shelf, in every book bag. That book was the one thing I owned that mattered at all. My throat swelled, but I took a deep breath. I was twelve years old and I didn’t want to give my father and my brothers the satisfaction of seeing me beg and bawl like a baby.

I climbed onto the truck bed and squeezed again between Jiro and Mariko, who complained that I was wrinkling her skirt. Jiro turned to me, eyebrows lightly furrowed. “What happened?”

I wanted to answer, but my throat was still swollen.

Kazuo was standing by the truck with my father. “Nice job, rice-for-brains,” he said to me. And then, to my father: “How did you know what to do?”

My father grunted. “These people are obviously desperate and corrupt. There’s only one way to deal with people like that.”

Kazuo chuckled, shaking his head. He put out his hand. “I’d like to have that book,” he said.

My father handed it to him. “It interests you?”

Kazuo leafed through it. “It does.”

“Keep it, then.”

“Hey!” I jumped to my feet and nearly fell over the side of the truck. “That’s my—”