Authors: Julie Wu
“They’ve gone away,” the girl said.
“
Hou,
” I said. “Quickly.”
We ran into the open field. Just as we reached the middle, a plane zoomed in from behind us. I jumped in terror, and the girl screamed, holding her writing board over her head with both hands. We had all heard of Americans shooting farmers in the field, of mowing down women carrying babies and market goods on their bicycles.
But when I looked up, I saw the Japanese flag painted on the fuselage. “It’s all right,” I shouted with relief. “He’s defending us.”
We stopped in the middle of the field at the awesome sight of the two planes dueling, swooping and firing and curving away over the heart of our town.
“Did you see that?”
“He got him, I think!”
And then one of the planes was trailing smoke out its side, and it swooped too low. We felt the crash through the ground with our feet.
When the other plane rose, we saw, on its side, the American flag.
“Oh no!” the girl cried as she broke into a run.
Terrified, I ran after her and then looked back. I stopped, seeing the plane head away toward the forest.
But then the plane banked, straightened out, and pointed its nose toward us, the pilot aiming his gun at my chest.
My breath stopped. The plane’s nose drew near, larger and larger. Everything became clear at once: This man would shoot us down like game. I would die in this field with this strange girl whose name I did not even know. My parents, who had never celebrated my birthday, would mourn my death with a procession, flowers, and incense. I would die hungry.
From a distance I heard the girl’s voice. She was screaming.
“Run!” she screamed. “What are you doing?”
I woke from my trance and ran after her. She was smaller and slower than me, even more so holding her board over her head, and in my terror at hearing the plane’s engine roaring at our backs, I overtook her easily.
I reached the street and heard her fall behind me. I turned to see her scrambling to get up, still holding the writing board over her head, her eyes large with panic. Bullets started to hit the field. I ran back and grabbed her arm, soft under my grip. I saw the dust rise from the grass behind her as I pulled her, all my muscles straining, and the sound of bullets exploded in my ears and in my chest. I yelled, barely hearing my own voice over the gunfire, not sure whether I was being shot. I pulled her across the last bit of field and through the broken door of a hardware shop. We clung together, shaking, in the corner of the shop while bullets hit the ceiling of the store.
Finally the shooting stopped and the plane buzzed away.
We jumped apart. I looked down. My whole body trembled and my heart pounded furiously. I was dirty, but there was no blood on me.
The girl held up her writing board. Its handle had been shot off.
“You see? It did protect me!”
I looked at the frayed rope and said nothing.
W
E SAT ON
a tool bench in the shop. She was the one, this time, who wanted to wait for the all clear. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and started rubbing at the streaks of dirt on her shoes from the woods.
“My papa says it’s important to take care of your clothes because they show what’s inside.”
She never stopped talking, which I didn’t mind, because it passed the time and calmed me. While I listened, I picked up bits of wire and scrap metal from the floor and attached them to a tin pipe I had in my pocket. She told me her Japanese name was Yoshiko and she liked being called that at school because it sounded pretty, though it wasn’t officially her name, as her father didn’t believe in changing their names to please the Japanese.
“But you would get better rations,” I said.
She shrugged. “My mother says that, too. But my papa is very proud, and he says no one can pay him to take a Japanese name. He’s going to take us to see the world,” she continued. “He has a whole plan.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a businessman. He doesn’t have any business right now, but he has big plans for when the war ends.”
“The whole world?”
She nodded. “Japan
and
China. He says all he needs is a boat.”
I paused at this, imagining Yoshiko on a boat to Japan. “What’s in Japan and China that isn’t here?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Yoshiko said. “But Papa says we wouldn’t be poor there.” She glanced at me.
I looked at her from head to toe. She didn’t look poor to me. Her clothes were, if anything, in finer condition than mine, though her white canvas shoes looked homemade.
“My papa goes to that movie theater near our old house on Chungcheng Road and it shows movies from all over the world. So he knows.”
“Japan and China?”
She nodded. “And Hong Kong. America, too.”
“I don’t like Americans,” I said.
“Me, neither,” she said, glancing at her writing board. She caught sight of my scrap-metal creation. “What’s that? A plane?”
I nodded and held it up. “The wings are hinged, see?”
“
Oua!
You’re so clever.” She touched a wing, bending it back a little.
I looked at her in surprise. I had many such creations at home, and to my family they were nothing but junk.
The all clear sounded and we walked out into the street. Her family had evacuated from the town’s main street to a house across the river, by the base of Turtle Head Mountain, and I walked with her down toward the bridge, the tin-pipe plane in my pocket. All around us the land thrilled with life, with the white of a heron’s wing as it rose from a paddy into the sky’s limitless blue, with the central mountains in the distance, lush and green. I wished we could keep walking together forever, just the two of us, with no one else but a distant farmer in a conical straw hat crossing toward us over the bridge on his bicycle.
“It’s going to rain,” I said. “Probably tomorrow.”
“Really? It’s so nice today.”
I pointed at the clouds overhead. “See those?”
“The ruffly ones?”
“It always rains when you see those,” I said. “You’ll see. If it was just puffy ones like those up there, I’d say it would be dry.”
She walked with her face turned up to the sky. “You have a good teacher.”
“No,” I said. “I just like being outside.”
Still looking up at the sky, she turned around and took a few steps backward. She stumbled and our shoulders brushed together.
“It’s a long walk,” I said. “Why don’t you go to a school by your house?”
“I did,” she said, facing forward again. “But I missed my teacher and my cousin, so I came back.”
“You’re lucky,” I said.
“Why?”
“You wanted to come back. And then you got to.”
“Hey!” She started running.
“Where are you going?” I ran after her. She was waving at the farmer, her white shoes flashing in the sun. But as he drew near, it appeared he was not a farmer at all. He was, in fact, not even a man, but a boy somewhere in his teen years, and he wore a school uniform. As he pulled up, he threw off his hat and laughed, his face handsome and brilliant as he smiled, his eyes sparkling.
“
A-hianh!
” Yoshiko cried out, laughing. “Why were you wearing that hat?”
Her brother laughed. “Thought it would help me blend in with the landscape, you know.” He skidded to a stop and patted Yoshiko on the shoulder. “You’re all right! We were so worried!”
“You came to find me?”
“Of course! Hop on. I caught a fish for you. We can fry it up when we get home.”
Yoshiko climbed onto the bicycle in front of him. He put his hands on the handlebars, his arms cradling her protectively, so that she looked up at him and smiled. Their gestures of intimacy came so naturally to them but were so wildly foreign to me that I stared.
“Who’s this boy?” Yoshiko’s brother asked, looking at me with a kind smile. “Do you need a ride?”
“Yes, you get on, too,” Yoshiko said. “He ran with me.”
“Maybe in the back . . . ,” her brother said.
But I couldn’t get onto the bike without disturbing their happy balance. And it was so far from my house. “I live way over on the other side of the railroad tracks,” I said. “I’ll walk.”
“But that’s where the rich people live.” Yoshiko looked surprised.
“That’s too far,” Yoshiko’s brother exclaimed. “You may not get home by sunset.”
“Here, in front of me. Your parents will worry—” As Yoshiko shifted, she dropped her writing board.
I picked up the board and handed it to her. “They don’t worry about me,” I said.
I looked down and waited for her to take the writing board. I closed my eyes, fighting down the ache of being left behind, of being alone and forgotten and uncared for.
I felt a hand on my head. I looked up into Yoshiko’s face, feeling my close-cropped hair brushing the softness of her palm.
“You helped me,” she said. “You’re a good boy.” She smiled, and I saw, even in her brother’s shadow, that the brown of her eyes was flecked with gold.
As her brother started pedaling away, she cried out, “See you at school, or maybe the movies!”
I watched them ride back over the bridge. I stood watching them until the bicycle receded and disappeared through a bend in the fields beyond.
She had given me the first tender moment of my life.
2
I
WALKED HOME, MY
feet crunching on the gravel in rhythm with the cicadas screeching in the banyan trees. I wasn’t alarmed to be alone in the countryside. I was used to it.
It had not always been this way. I had once roamed the fields with my little brother Aki, one year younger than me. I had played with Aki every day and prevented the others from taking his meager share of food at the table. I had taken care of him as well as a little boy could. But when Aki was four, he woke one morning with his eyes glassy, his skin burning under my hand.
Pneumonia,
I heard the surgeon tell my parents
. You’ll need to take him to the hospital.
How did he get it, Doctor?
The cold weather, the rain. He’s very thin.
Ai! You see, Saburo. I told you not to keep him outside so late!
A couple of weeks later, Aki died. I was hiding behind a rice barrel in the kitchen when I heard.
The colors of the countryside deepened in the yellowing light as I reached the railroad tracks. The last train to Taipei hurtled by, blue passenger cars roaring, curving away north, side rods pumping up and down, windows glinting orange in the setting sun.
Brainchild of the Japanese, the train was always on time, and it meant that I was late. For a moment I stood still, thinking of the gray walls of my house and what awaited me there: the front door, so massive it would dam the Tamsui River, my mother behind the door, my father in his armchair, his political cronies by his side.
The train receded, leaving in its wake the smell of coal and the calls of frogs hidden in the light-tipped grass. An egret glided over rice paddies lit like so many molten pools, its wings on fire.
I walked again, my muscles now tense with fear, and crossed the tracks to take the long road toward my house. My stomach clenched at the rich smells of buffalo dung and the marsh grass that swished quietly in the wind, the long blades bending now and again to reveal the far-off semicircle of granite that was the tomb of my first Taiwanese ancestor.
I took out my tin-pipe plane and dragged it behind me, its hinged wings folding and unfolding as I walked. One of the wires broke, and I twisted grass around it instead, thinking that Yoshiko would have thought me clever. I pulled the plane past the tomb of my second Taiwanese ancestor, a rice farmer, and then my third, a doctor. But now I was so close to the house that not even the plane could bring me pleasure. I tucked it back into my pocket and I turned the corner, stomach contracting, mouth dry at the sight of our heavy front door with its old-fashioned wooden lock.
When I opened the door, my mother stood behind it in her worn cheongsam, her face long and tired—square-jawed like mine, one eye double lidded and the other not—with her arm raised, holding a bamboo switch to beat me.
The pain of the first blow knocked me to my knees—the blunt force of the main branch against my side, the sharpness of the little twigs cutting into the skin between my shirt and the waistband of my shorts. And then as she drew her arm back again I scrambled to get facedown on the floor in my habitual pose, arms over my head, nose to the musty floorboards, and braced for the next blow.
“Always late! Do you know what
time
it is?”
My flesh was tender, my skin thin and easily bruised. A child’s body is not designed to withstand the kind of blows that an adult can wield with the better part of a tree. Or rather, the child can withstand in the sense of survival, but the nerve endings will never be completely restored. They will remain raw and painful for the rest of the child’s life.