Quotes from Shawna Yang Ryan

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think you expect I will say that Western is modern, and that our culture is old-fashioned. But I don't believe that. I don't believe the West equals modernity. The idea is colonialist.

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.

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.

A line of dark-eyed women dribbled out the door, continued past the sundries shop next door, and folded around the corner. They waited politely despite every impulse to rush the police station, leap over the desks, and tear at the files. After each unsuccessful query, they whispered down the line that the man in question could not be found, but each woman still believed her husband would be the exception.

What is home? I wanted to ask. Haven't I already come home?

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.

Maybe this is what it meant to be a citizen of a place—bonded to each other by the histories thrust upon us.

Two distant points now touching, the word and the page a bridge and amends.

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.

Thousands of husbands disappeared in those weeks. Sons as young as twelve. Brothers. Friends. What better way to remake society, my mother thought, than to eliminate the teachers and principals, the students, the lawyers and doctors—truly, anybody who had an opinion and a voice? Beyond the river, execution grounds, field after field irrigated with blood, waited to be discovered. Buildings would crush the bones.

She walked as if she had nothing in mind but her destination—or something beyond it—staring ahead with Mama's elongated black eyes, glossy with a kind of circumspect longing.

Being Taiwanese in Japan was like being a guitar-playing monkey: their fluent Japanese elicited awe from the people they met, yet they were considered not-quite-whole people.

It's charity." Baba reluctantly lifted his eyes from the jumble of scrolls piled on a shadowed shelf. "What is?" "The liquor. The men meet their fates half giddy. They barely know what is happening. Didn't the Japanese do the same?" "They didn't have firing squads." My father couldn't keep the sneer out of his voice.

A few weeks later, my mother found a letter nailed to the gate. The grim black ink declared our misfortune to every passerby: we were to be the neighborhood's third eviction. The soldiers now claimed that our beautiful house—with its blond tatami and white paper screens and dark halls—was to be requisitioned. My family had two days.

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.

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.