Green Island: A novel

Book I

Taipei

1947–­1952

It was like this.

1947

1

My mother Li Min’s labor pains began the night that the widow was beaten in front of the Tian-­ma Teahouse.

The first cramp was unmistakable. She leaned against the wall and pressed her fingers to the underside of her belly. All her previous children had taken their time, leisurely writhing for days before they finally decided to emerge. She expected the same with her fourth.

The children, freshly bathed and rosy from the hot water, their hair still damp, were upstairs in bed. She went outside and around the house to add more kindling to the furnace that would keep the water warm for my father’s bath. A wave went through her, like a girdle expanding, pulled from the front of her pelvis to her back. She exhaled. Some women toiled up until the moment that they gave birth in a field, then went back to work while nursing the still-­bloody newborn. This was women’s lore. My mother, however, had given birth each time in her husband’s clinic, with hot water and a midwife, and then appreciatively followed the prescription for a reclusive month indoors, hair unwashed, eating chicken soup, attended by a Cantonese woman her husband hired. No fields for her.

Across town, the widow, who sold black market cigarettes in front of the teahouse run by the popular silent film narrator Zhan Tian-­ma, was about to become infamous.

She was just a young woman with a dead husband, sitting on her haunches behind a cheap makeshift stand on a busy road. She was a few years older than my mother, with two children playing in the waning light on the sidewalk next to her spindly-­legged table. The lights on the street were coming up, and people—­artists, writers, actors—­the types who would drink, smoke, and laugh their way through the end of the world—­drifted out of the teahouse. Often, they stopped at the widow’s stand. She even sold American cigarettes. They tore open the pack right there, lighting up with a match she gave them.

The night was chilly, and smoke mixed with breath in the cold air. The widow’s eyes settled on a pair of lovers who meandered down an alley, whispering, arm to warm arm. She was gazing in their direction, thinking of her dead husband, when the Monopoly Bureau agents approached. She knew only a smattering of Mandarin but did not need it to translate their haughty faces, or their greedy hands confiscating her cigarettes.

A shout of protest flew from her lips.

People turned.

One agent’s face blazed, and he cursed the widow, reaching once more for her cigarettes. She grabbed his arm and he shouted, “Let go!” Ignited by his tone, the crowd drew closer, clamoring for the agent to stop. In a way, weren’t they all widows selling black market cigarettes? And can shame—­or pride—­explain why the agent threw the widow to the ground, fumbled for his pistol, gripping it as if he would shoot, and then slammed the butt into her head? Was he merely saving face?

The bath was drawn and the room muted by steam. Dr. Tsai was naked, on a low stool, ladling water from the tub over his shoulders. Li Min hitched up her dress, settled slowly on another stool behind her husband, and began lathering the washcloth.

Another cramp knotted up. She gasped softly and exhaled. Her arm fell to her side as she waited for it to pass.

Dr. Tsai looked over his shoulder. “What is it?”

“It’s begun.”

“When?”

“Just a few minutes ago.”

She watched her husband’s shoulders relax. “I’ll go for Aunty Cheung after we’re done,” he said.

But she thought the midwife could wait until morning, and she told him so. After her first child, she’d sworn not to have any more. One already required her whole self—­absolute, daily devotion—­but then there had been two, then three, and now four, like spirits forcing their way into the world, demanding life despite her precautions. She was ready to pray to the fertility goddess to take her blessings elsewhere, and deeply grateful that her husband agreed.

She moved the washcloth in slow circles and watched the skin on his back bloom pink.

Perhaps she’d end up like her neighbor’s mother, having children into her late forties. The woman’s breasts dangled like a street dog’s teats beneath her thin shirt.

Four was already just shy of a litter, she thought.

“We’re done,” Dr. Tsai said. He rinsed himself, shook the water from his hair, and put a hand gingerly into the tub. He pulled back; it was bright red. “Ah,” he said, pleased. He stepped into the water and sank down.

With effort, Li Min rose. Her face glowed with sweat and steam.

“It’s too hot for me. I can’t stand it,” she told her husband.

The cigarette vendor clutched her head. Her fingers were greasy with blood. Pain rippled through her skull in slow waves. She imagined she heard her children screaming somewhere in the chaos.

The Monopoly Bureau agents, pressed to the widow’s fallen body by the crowd rolling angrily toward them in a fog of cursing, kicked her. Eyes wild, the agents waved their guns and threatened to shoot, but the crowd’s cries swallowed their words.

The people would not retreat; some fought to get to the bleeding cigarette vendor, while others surged forward in rage. The agents began firing and the crowd collapsed, fleeing, breaking into a hundred splinters.

Li Min paced the hall.

The midwife had told her it was natural to feel regret, but this did not stop her guilt. The worst was the months after each baby had arrived, when she wondered what curse she had visited upon this new thing by bringing it into the world.

Behind the bathroom door, water splashed occasionally, but her husband, resting neck-­deep in the tub, was otherwise quiet.

Was it possible this one would be a son too? She hoped so, but not because she favored men. Her husband modeled the seriousness, the stoicism, that she hoped her sons would inherit, but she had nothing to teach a daughter. She could teach her to dream—­say, to be a painter, as she herself had been trained—­and then teach her to let it go. Teach her to cloister herself in dark hallways, admiring how the light fell through the rice-­paper doors while knowing that there was no point in putting it on canvas. Already, her oldest child, a daughter, at ten years old could make simple meals, washed laundry, and cared for her younger brothers. Li Min did not know how to give her more.

Last time, the midwife had said castor oil would bring out the baby faster. But the shops were closed.

She concentrated on pressing each foot deliberately onto the floor, feeling the wood, cool at first and then warming to her skin. She concentrated her whole mind in her feet and tried to forget the pain.

The agents stumbled their way through the street and hid in a police box, where they waited while the military police were called.

A knot of people eased open. Among them, a man lay bleeding. Bystanders turned him over, saw the bullet hole clogged with blood. Shouting helplessly, pushing someone’s shirt against the wound and feeling it grow heavy and wet, they watched his eyes glaze over, his mouth gape. Somebody beckoned to a rickshaw. When the driver saw the dead man, he shook his head and waved his hands in protest. “Oh no. No dead passengers.” He cycled away.

Two Samaritans made a stretcher out of shirts and carried the body away.

The military police arrived and the crowd rushed them to demand a summary execution, on the spot, for the murderers, who cowered inside the police box. The MPs promised justice at headquarters.

Justice. That abstract word. Reluctantly, the crowd allowed the Monopoly Bureau agents to be escorted away. But the bystanders’ fettered rage demanded release. They pulled open the doors of the agents’ abandoned truck, ransacking the backseat, building a bonfire of everything they found inside. The crackle of the fire was hungry.

Still electrified, they turned their attention to the truck itself. They rocked it until it fell over and the windows on one side shattered.

...

Her husband slept but Li Min could not. Next to him, she sat up in the dark, feeling the weight of the baby pressing against her bones. If she had risen, gone downstairs, and soothed herself beside the radio, she might have heard the news.

The fire burned itself out, leaving a heap of ash on the pavement.