Green Island Quotes

“Maybe this is what it meant to be a citizen of a place - bonded to each other by the histories thrust upon us.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“I understand,” she says, and then she quotes Du Fu: “The country is broken, but the mountains and rivers remain.” Her eyes flash; he catches sight of the fire in this modest woman. “We are the mountains and rivers,” he says, impressed. “No matter what the country is called.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“We are curious creatures, we Taiwanese. Orphans. Eventually, orphans must choose their own names and write their own stories. The beauty of orphanhood is the blank slate.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“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.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“No memorial was built for the men who had survived by selling their souls. The thousands who had disappeared over the years, stained as criminals, who emerged back into the light as neighborhood pariahs for nothing more than the desire to claim an island as their own. No memorial for the men more complicated than martyrs – or for the families who'd had to relearn the hardships of the everyday.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“I want to believe that my parents found a way to bypass time that night, to compress and expand their lives together, to live out their whole lives again in their goodbye.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“for Jia Bao’s storyline, I drew on the experiences of Peng Ming-Min, Henry Liu, and Chen Wen-cheng to understand the various legal and extralegal mechanisms the KMT government used to control its challengers, particularly from abroad.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Two distant points now touching, the word and the page a bridge and amends.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Maybe this is what it meant to be a citizen of a place—bonded to each other by the histories thrust upon us.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“My father’s face was not among them. No memorial was built for the men who had survived by selling their souls. The thousands who had disappeared over the years, stained as criminals, who emerged back into the light as neighborhood pariahs for nothing more than the desire to claim an island as their own. No memorial for the men more complicated than martyrs—or for the families who’d had to relearn the hardships of the everyday.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“What is home? I wanted to ask. Haven’t I already come home?”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Hope springs eternal—a truism for jilted lovers and for the children of dying parents. We convince ourselves the inevitable isn’t, and when it is upon us, we rail and plead. Or deny. Busy with preparation and travel, I had pushed away my worry; now that I was here, at midmorning in Taipei, when less than a day before I’d been in the chilly Bay Area, my new reality struck me.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“I stood in the line for US citizens, my blue passport in hand, once again aware of the strangeness of returning to my country as the citizen of another. The customs official, a man in his thirties”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“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. No one else could understand it. I knew that for as long as Wei and I were married, even if my head was turned by another, the other man and I would not share this one critical thing—this one summer—and that would be enough to unmake any potential love affair. I thought of all the moments growing up when I had disliked my family—my resentment of my father, my disgust at my mother, my anger at my siblings. Of all the families in the world, why was I born into this family? I’d thought. As if just dumb fate had brought us together. Now I understood there was something stronger than fate. Choice. It was ugly and quotidian and lacked romance, and that was exactly what gave it its strength. So, like my mother, I chose to stay.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“I tipped my head back to squeeze out my dripping hair and saw the moon haloed by a cloud. Emily and Stephanie would be asleep by now. I felt linked through the years to Baba by this moon, which had witnessed it all. Had he stood here too, under its gaze, thinking of his sleeping children? I longed to say to him: Baba, I understand.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“The event had not even existed until I’d heard the story. It happened this way for each of us, one by one, across the island, a structure suddenly exploding onto the placid empty plain of our history.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“While our friends were rioting, handcuffed and starving, in the yard, we were the ones banging on open cell doors, bellies full, crying for our freedom.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Look,” I said to the girls, and they offered a polite coo of awe. I thought of the discrete memories of my childhood—vivid moments rising above the vagueness of long stretches of unremembered time—and I wondered if they would recall this day, and the five of us together.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“But now that I’m here, Taiwan feels like home. Isn’t it funny? The two of us here, so far away, brought together by the island?” I understood what she meant. The names of people and places had meaning and memories; she could mention a street, a site, and it would bloom before my eyes: the direction of the afternoon shadows, the odor of charcoal and exhaust and benjo sludge, the commotion of horns and voices. The sound of Taiwanese jumbled with Mandarin. There, however, our paths would never have crossed. America—or was it exile?—had erased our differences.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Later, chatting with me about her own recent delivery, a friend told me how the doctor had informed her that she was considered a “good candidate” for post-delivery bonding. They had let the still-bloody baby warm himself on her bare chest. I was too ashamed to admit that no one had said such a thing to me.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“The shadow-leaves danced on the wall. A chair leg stuttered across the floor downstairs and then silence.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“What’s the point?” I asked even though I didn’t expect an answer. He shook his head. “I don’t know. Power.” He took a drag on the cigarette. “To what end?”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“I love the delicacy of Asian women,” one wife commented to me. “So petite, so graceful.” Self-conscious with the language, I could only nod and smile while I railed against her silently in a string of words that were anything but delicate. Cow! Tell me next how my culture has given me the skills to be an amazing house cleaner. An obedient wife. Ask me how many of my friends were prostitutes for GIs. They were kind—too kind—as if I were helpless as a bald little newborn mole and they had to show how careful they could be with me, a testament to their generous and socially liberal natures.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“The first time I called home, after my arrival in San Francisco, I broke down in tears and wasted five whole minutes—a fortune—just crying. Now when I called, their voices were hollow and distant. I wondered how much of what I said they could imagine. They passed the phone back and forth, demanding to talk to the girls, who squirmed and said nothing, perplexed by these grandparents whom they had never met. Taiwan was very far away.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“It’s December 15, 1978, when he makes the announcement. His smile is cautious—this is good news, but he knows that his statement, in eight minutes, will delegitimize a government and turn a half century of history into a joke. That is why his people waited until the last possible moment to tell the Republic of China that today is the day.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“I have something else for you.” “Ba, I can’t fit anything else.” He held a jar filled with what looked like coffee grounds. I leaned forward. The jar still bore strips of glue where the label had been washed away. I swore I would say no. I doubted it would pass customs. “This is a godforsaken place. I sometimes wish that you—all of us—could leave and forget it. We’re a cursed people,” he said. “Ba. Please.” I slid yet another package of jerky between some shirts. Impatient, I was afraid to encourage another one of his flights of persecution. “I want you to take this.” I pulled away from my suitcase and looked again at the jar. “What is it?” “Soil from our garden.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“It was the highest praise I could expect, and I felt grateful though I longed for him to say he loved me too.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Then he reached out and squeezed my hand; I stiffened in response to the unfamiliar gesture. When he relaxed his grip, his palm quaked against mine. Both yearning and pathetic, this act stunned me. Baba had not done more than clap a shoulder—or perhaps straighten my jacket or smooth a hair into place—in the last thirteen years.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“We’d known enough girls jilted by Americans promising marriage and plane tickets. Two girls in my neighborhood had babies by men who had returned to the United States and left false addresses. The faces of their mixed-race kids declared their humiliation to everyone.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“His clothes were fashionable, but decidedly American—the colors and cuts slightly off. I felt a twinge of pity. I wondered if he felt like a stranger here in Taiwan, the place that should have been home.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island