OPINION:
GREEN ISLAND
By Shawna Yang Ryan
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, $26.95, 400 pages
From 1895 to 1945 the Japanese ruled Taiwan. They required the Taiwanese to speak Japanese, to wear kimonos and other Japanese garments, and even to adopt Japanese names. They built factories and their navy used Taiwan’s ports, so in World War II the United States bombed the island, especially during the Battle of Okinawa. In 1945 the Japanese were ousted, but what next? For two centuries before the Japanese arrival, China had colonized Taiwan, and the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) government now took over, and poured the island’s resources in their doomed fight against the Communists on the mainland.
Food was short. Reconstruction halted. Finally, as Ah Zhay, sister of the narrator of Green Island explains, “Set off by a gendarme’s beating of a street vendor, a young widow selling cigarettes, people took to the streets, protesting, picking fights, challenging passers-by on the sidewalks with questions in Taiwanese. … If you have nothing, at the very least you have rice, but people didn’t even have that. Meanwhile people said the KMT were hoarding. They were eating well, throwing parties. Worms eating an apple.”
On the night of this fighting, now called the February 28 Incident, the unnamed narrator was born, delivered by Ah Zhay and their father Dr. Tsai. A few days later he is one of the thousands rounded up by the government. His crime? Attendance at a community meeting. He’s gone for 11 years, during which time his family doesn’t even know if he is alive. He returns a shattered man, and never practices medicine again. Meanwhile two million Chinese fled to Taiwan when the Communists took over in China, and now the KMT operate a brutal martial law that falls heavily on native Taiwanese.
Author Shawna Yang Ryan retells this 20th-century history of Taiwan through the experiences of the Tsai family, both in Taiwan, and later in California. It’s a difficult story, vexed with dark episodes and unresolved mysteries, and beset with political changes, especially after President Nixon and Henry Kissinger visit China. Keeping track of these and ploughing through the details of oppression is not always easy, but Ms. Ryan has a steady and determined hand as she unfolds a story that has often been sidelined by news of Taiwan as an economic tiger. Her account piques curiosity. Many readers will find themselves moving from her novel to scan other sources for details of the political jostling that has molded Taiwan.
But “Green Island” is much more than an historical novel. It’s also a family epic. The narrator, who becomes her father’s favorite, is with him when he is recalled to Taipei for questioning. She sees the unbearable stress he is under, and watches his reactions. In California, where she lives after marrying the US-educated son of a family friend, similar dilemmas face her. She is not entirely comfortable with her husband’s political activities. At times she doubts she loves him — or that he loves her. She struggles to formulate what love between husband and wife may mean, and what parental love may require of her. Though she lives in California, the events that beset her and her efforts to deal with them are shaped by Taiwan. It’s not just that her father’s history is constantly in her mind, but that her responses are Taiwanese. When she ponders her marriage, for example, she thinks of Taiwanese rather than American norms. This lack of an East-West argument invites the reader inside the dynamics of the marriage, and more generally inside Taiwan. It also helps deflect absolute judgments, exposing them as too easy in a world where so much is so complex.
“Green Island” is fairly long — nearly 400 pages — so it’s no fast read, and though the author twists the strands of her story into a firm braid, it’s not an easy read either. This is partly due to the difficulties that have bedeviled Taiwan’s development into a democracy. It’s also the result of the moral complexity of the events that the Tsai family have to handle. There’s no quick way of processing these; they demand thought, so “Green Island” is a chewy novel. Also, in a way, it’s smelly too. Shawna Yang Ryan invariably evokes places and people by aroma rather than by visual detail. A doctor arrives “shawled in the odor of coffee and tuna sandwiches,” “the ringing odor of blood” hangs over an injured man, perhaps most oddly a fish market smells “of algae and glass.”
This novel is the author’s second, and it’s gripping: a triumph of sustained focus on unusually thorny material.
• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.
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