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A massacre may incur silence, but a random shooting inspires ardor.
The disappearances were an island-wide secret. My father was not the only man who had evaporated. It seemed everyone knew someone, and it was simply unspoken: this way we could not count the missing; we would not know for decades that the dead measured in the tens of thousands.
prison. He had dreamed of the sky, and then discovered its endlessness a burden.
separate out rage from violence; physical acts come out of cool heads and hot heads should be followed by still hands.
Marriage was always for love, but sometimes that love was for family, not the lover.
But none of the terror could have happened without the tacit agreement of the American government, Taiwan’s former and closest ally.
I knew what it was to land here, dizzy, the past wiped away by an ocean, the future unfurling like an unexploited continent.
“Once you realize all our assumptions about power are created by the powerful, you understand it must be changed. You rethink power. Not the power that is desire, or dominance. The power that is strength.”
Peng Ming-min, who had been arrested for writing the Formosa Declaration of Independence?
Maybe what made the years bearable was to let all those bad feelings slip beneath the surface unacknowledged. We closed our eyes and dove in, ears muffled and holding our breath, and when we emerged again, a lifetime would have passed.
“I don’t think you understand. He’s very well known in my country. He was under house arrest. The government wanted him dead. There’s no way that this was an accident. The KMT men are ruthless. I am sure that they killed him.” “You said Thailand?” the officer asked. “Taiwan.” Ordinarily, Wei would have launched into a small sermon on the difference. Now, wearily, he said only, “Taiwan, Republic of China. Not Thailand.”
He told me that the twin daughters of the recently arrested activist Lin Yi-hsiung had been murdered the day before. Just a run-of-the-mill big-city crime, except for the date, the circumstances, the victims, and the perpetrators. February 28. Broad daylight. Taipei City. Victims: seven-year-old twin girls and their grandmother. Girls barely older than Emily. Girls who no doubt owned the same kinds of toys: googly-eyed stickers, baby dolls with painted plastic mouths and nylon hair, wasp-waisted Barbies. Girls who sketched the same kinds of rainbow-framed drawings and made the same kinds of
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Outside, Baba smiled at Wei. My daughters, showing off to their father and grandfather, beamed. In the trees around the house, cicadas buzzed. This scene. Exactly and only this.
Our ideas of love were clearly different; where I saw devotion, she saw duty. I cared how one felt, while to her what one did was what mattered. I wondered if I should pity her. Or perhaps my abstract concept was the more hopeless one.
I realized that this was what Mama had meant by love. A shared experience, a shared history, a shared trauma: this is what made us a family.
The compassion that I suddenly felt for him surprised me. I joined him at the window, trying to understand what he saw. Buildings, the haphazard jumble that betrayed the city’s turbulent history, obscured the horizon, but I imagined I saw the curve of the earth, a smash of life gradually thinning out at the edges, sprinkled into the dark green hills, empty to the sea, an island, shaped like a yam, or perhaps a leaf of tobacco, with a black spine of dark mountains and knobby strings of twinkling lights cascading down the edges.
THE WORLD DOES NOT HAPPEN the way we lay it out on paper: one event after another, one word following the next like a trail of ants. The rocks in the field do not preclude the flowing river fifty miles away; a man sneezes and at the exact same time a woman washes her feet, a child trips and blood oozes from the broken skin, a dog nips at a flea on its hindquarter, and a bird swallows a beetle. Past, present, and future too swirl together, distinguishable but not delineated by any sort of grammar beyond the one our hearts impose.
He had no prayer, believing only one thing from the thousands of Christian words she had said to him: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
This night felt so broad, broader than the years that had preceded it. He wondered how the decades condensed like this, disappearing into a blink, while one moment unfurled almost endlessly. How quickly it all had passed.
susurration
This is not an exhaustive list, but it is a good place to start for a reader who is interested in finding out more about Taiwan and the themes explored in this novel. Linda Gail Arrigo, A Borrowed Voice: Taiwan Human Rights Through International Networks 1960–1980 Edward I-te Chen, “Formosan Political Movements under the Japanese Colonial Rule 1914–1937” Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation James Davidson, Island of Formosa, Past and Present Mark Harrison, Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity David E.
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