The Third Son Read Online Free PDF Page B

and whooped when our principal announced the attacks at Pearl Harbor? Hadn’t we just finished cheering on the Japanese fighter pilots, the ones who didn’t shoot us down?
    My teachers had taught us all the good things the Japanese had done for Taiwan. They had built our schools, our airfields, the rail lines stretching north to Keelung and south all the way to Kaohsiung. They had even let the Taiwanese people elect local representatives. Representatives like my father.
    My father grunted and shifted in his armchair when we asked him these questions after a particularly breathless radio commentary about Chiang Kai-shek. “Only at the end did the Japanese let us do these things. At the beginning they squashed us down like bugs. Tens of thousands of Taiwanese. Like this.” He drew his finger across his throat and pointed to our family altar, where incense smoldered in a small pot before a scroll of our family tree. “Our ancestors are from China. Never forget it. Japan and China have been warring for many years. In 1895, Japan defeated China and got Taiwan. Now, with this American bomb, Japan has lost the war and lost Taiwan. We are going back to the Chinese, and people will always be glad to be ruled by their own kind. This is why everyone celebrates.” He paused, frowning into the distance.
    “But the situation is more complicated than many people realize. It is not just any Chinese who come to rule us, but the Nationalists, and they are not coming here because they want to,” he said. “They are coming in defeat.”
    “I thought you said they beat Japan,” I said. Kazuo snickered behind me.
    “China is split,” my father said impatiently. “The Nationalists have ruled for a short time and the Communists are rising and decimating the Nationalist power base. The Communists and the Nationalists fought off the Japanese together but were also fighting each other, and the Communists are winning. Chiang Kai-shek is almost done for. But the Americans support him. They dislike Communism, and that is why, though the Nationalists are losing control of China, they get us as a booby prize.”
    He took a couple of puffs on his cigarette. “And so the losers get the sweet potato,” he said, referring, as we all did, to Taiwan’s tuber-like shape, “and we welcome them with open arms.”
    I STUFFED MY book into my rucksack and hurried outside, where the whole family except for my father was piled into the bed of a delivery truck.
    I climbed in and squeezed between Jiro and my younger sister Mariko on the metal bed. I felt a pull on my rucksack. “What are you doing with that?” Kazuo said from behind me. “It’s dirtying my trousers.”
    I yanked it back and curled my arm around it. Jiro moved over to make room. He looked at me. He had grown bigger, like me, nearly as tall as our mother, but his eyes were still fearful as a little boy’s. “Why are we going to see the soldiers? They’re so loud.”
    Their march, he meant. The only army we knew was the Japanese imperial army, whose synchronized march was so loud and terrifying that the streets would empty long before any soldier was visible. We naturally assumed the Chinese army would be the same.
    “A parade!” my father scoffed. “We fought the Japanese when they came. People weren’t stupid then.” I looked to the side of the truck, where my father approached the cab with the Taoyuan magistrate, a thin man who wore black glasses and a friendly smile. He had been a leader of the Home Rule Association under the Japanese.
    “Come, old man,” the magistrate said. “For so many years we have dreamed of this moment. Celebrate.”
    “We have dreamed of the Japanese leaving, not of the Chinese Nationalists coming. Don’t you wonder why they were so unpopular in China?”
    The magistrate laughed, his thin face creased deeply around his mouth as he opened the cab door and clapped my father on the back. “Such a man! Don’t worry. The Chinese are our brethren.