41st Year of Meiji (1908)
Daitotei, Formosa
His mother awoke him at dawn. He clawed his way out of the gauzy mosquito net with sleep thick in his mouth.
In the kitchen, he slumped at the table and ate the breakfast she had put out for him. She pinched his arm as she passed by, muttering, Lazy, lazy. He dropped his eyes, watching her feet, horned with calluses and grey with dust, until she left the room, and then he began to slurp down his porridge, feeding his growing pains.
The soymilk seller cried out: Hot soymilk, crispy fried doughnuts. At their cart, just feet away, Lin’s mother lit the stove and coaxed the flame with her breath. She set a cauldron of water atop the fire. Lin unfolded tables and put out stools. He returned to cart, peeled the damp muslin covering a brick of tofu, and sliced it using a string. When the water began to boil, his mother ran her arm across her forehead, and shouted, “Noodles!”
For as long as he could remember, he had watched the arc of the sun traced through the sky from behind the noodle cart.
It would not have been different had his father been there, his mother said.
The caravan appeared after noon. A man banging a gong led the parade of dingy men and a water buffalo dragging a cart. Another man sat in the cart, among boxes, with his face against a machine and his hand turning a crank.
“A spectacle of light! Tonight at dusk! Be amazed by our moving picture show!”
The clank of the gong sliced among the buildings. The hawkers fell silent. Men held their chopsticks aloft.
A man in a dark western-style suit, like a missionary, marched beside the buffalo. He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and used it to wipe at his forehead. It was a tiny flourish of elegance, exotic and decadent. Five other men followed behind the cart, and behind them a gaggle of children who raced forward and fell back, crying out in high pitched mimicry the man’s cry.
A spectacle of light. Lin could not imagine what this meant. Once, he had collected coins for months until he had enough money to peer into a Kinetoscope: one minute of a boxing match: shirtless foreigners beating each other, a year before his birth. The minute passed too quickly, and yet Lin had felt the money was well spent. For a minute, he became a seer, glimpsing the past.
The tail end of the shrieking children passed and Lin felt as if a lasso swung tight around his body, dragging him forth. He dropped the change he’d been making and ran into the road.
His mother’s voice was lost in another strike of the gong and Lin did not wait for her to repeat herself.
The children stopped at the edge of the field and watched the cart rumble over the dirt until it stopped, a fallen meteor, dust settling around it and a streak of flattened grass in its wake.
As one man unhitched the buffalo, another grabbed a bucket from the cart and walked toward Lin, one of the oldest and tallest of the gawking kids.
“Can you get some water?”
Lin nodded, solemn, and raced off.
He waited behind the woman pumping water. He exhaled deeply, swung the bucket from hand to hand, jiggled his foot until the woman snapped, “What the hell!” and lumbered away, her body bent over the weight of the water.
He returned slowly, the bucket in both hands before him, careful not to slosh the water. He brought it to the buffalo himself and stood before it as it drank. He imagined himself an elegant tall bird, a stork, and he waited for the men to acknowledge him.
The cart had been unloaded. Trunks and boxes and sacks littered the ground. The man in the suit approached. Lin smelled fatigue rising from him like the odor of unpeeled onions. He held out money for Lin, “Could you bring us food?”
Lin looked at the money and then, for the first time, into the man’s face. He was young: smooth skinned, rosy cheeked, eyes like black marbles. Lin grunted, a sound that was supposed to mean yes.
As the men ate his mother’s noodles, Lin sat in the grass, tearing out blade after blade. They were noisy. They gulped, clattered their chopsticks, spoke about things and people unfamiliar to Lin. The man in the suit peeled off his coat. He wore a white shirt with a row of mother-of-pearl buttons. A drop of sweat rolled down his neck and disappeared into his collar.
When they were done, Lin collected the empty bowls and stacked them one into the other on the tray. They invited him to come back at dusk.
Time passed in fits and starts until his mother finally killed the fire and the two of them pushed the cart back home.
A large white sheet was stretched taut between two poles like the single remaining wall of a destroyed house. Across an expanse of bare ground, a machine rose on four spindly legs. Cylindrical canisters lay beside it.
The man in the suit beckoned Lin over.
“Your name?”
“Lin.”
“Ah Hsiang. Listen, this is easy.” He handed Lin a palm leaf fan and pointed toward a middle-aged man with droopy eyes who fiddled with the machine, “You just have to keep him cool. And at intermission, wet the screen. Keep it cool. As long as that man and that sheet don’t burn up, we’ll pay you.”
Lin turned the fan over in his hand. It was ordinary; a deep yellow, shaped like a teardrop. This was even less interesting than fetching food.
Ah Hsiang rushed off toward the musicians setting up near the sheet. The man with sad eyes, tall and lank in a ragged mandarin coat, opened the metal canisters, hung wheels on the spokes of the machine and began threading a glistening strip through various take-ups. He mumbled a greeting at Lin, who stood with his arms crossed.
The gold light of the sinking sun faded and gray overtook the sky. People began arriving. Ah Hsiang wandered among them collecting money. They sat on blankets on the grass or on tiny stools they had brought. A man pushed his corn-roasting cart to the edge of the field. Kids bunched together and poked and whispered each other when they saw Lin, but they did not approach him. He was as untouchable as the strangers who had rolled into town that afternoon. He fanned himself idly.
The crowd spread out like spilled water around the sheet—in front, behind, to all sides. Their faces shone in the dark. Small children raced around. They hopped among the adults and disappeared into the dark reaches of the field and back again. Finally, Ah Hsiang strode through the group and stood at the front, a dark figure against the glowing white sheet.
The thin man in the frayed coat turned some small spigots on the machine. Gas hissed and light exploded. The crowd gasped into silence. Lin stepped back. The light bleached Ah Hsiang and outlined him in a heavy black shadow
“You can start now,” the man whispered. Lin began to vigorously fan the machine. The man breathed heavily as he adjusted the gas lines and tapped the gauges, “These things sometimes explode if you aren’t careful,” he muttered through his teeth.
“Honored guests, welcome! Welcome to our spectacle of light. Behind me, this ordinary white sheet will erupt with life in just a moment. Yes—life—an entire world to mirror our own. Like stepping through a looking glass. Behind you, that machine spilling light, is a projector. We have loaded it with reels of film, upon which thousands of still pictures lie. As soon as my friend throws the generator crank, starting the electrical flow, the reels will spin the film through the stream of light, making the pictures come alive!” Ah Hsiang was transformed. His dusty shirt looked crisp in the light. He swung his hands through the air as he spoke. His sonorous voice echoed as if it had leaped from the looking glass world. People craned their necks to watch the projector sputter to life.
The first images were blurred shapes. The projectionist focused the machine and smears of black turned into a man at a table inside an office. The man was as large as a real man, and as real as any man. Lin’s arm fell by his side. He could see the glowing faces of the people sitting on the other side of the screen. Their eyes were wide, their mouths still. Children froze, stunned, their mouths ajar.
“Kid!” the projectionist snapped. Lin began to fan again. The musicians played.
Suddenly, men burst into the office with guns. A woman screamed.
The two men in black beat the man in the vest and tied him up. Lin let the fan laze. Was this like opera, or was this real? The poor man, face down on the floor, tied at wrist and knee.
The bandits left and suddenly they were beside the railroad tracks. A train eased up. Instinctively, Lin turned his head to the right to watch its arrival, even as he knew he would see nothing but other people also searching for the ghost train.
The bandits broke in on a man sorting sacks of money and they exchanged gunfire to the pounding of drums. A child wailed. The bandits blew up a trunk and a huge plume of smoke filled most of the screen. Lin waited for the acrid odor to reach him, but smelled nothing but grass and summer.
He had never been on a train, but when the bandits emerged on top of the racing train, he felt the wind. His heart hammered and he feared he would drop the fan when the men began fighting. Even if this was show, just spectacle, how could they keep from accidentally rolling off.
The engine uncoupled and rolled away. The bandits leaped out from the stilled cars, followed by more and more and more people until these foreigners in costumes—the women in big hats and layered skirts, the men in dark, slim suits—began to fill up the screen. And then one tried to escape and was shot. He lay dead on the track. The soles of his shoes faced the stunned viewers. He did not stir.
A woman ran up to the screen and tried to put her hands on the dead man. The entire crowd of frightened train riders rippled, were distorted by the woman’s touch. She didn’t see that the dead man was now cast upon her back and when she tried to caress his head, he suddenly appeared on the skin of her hand. The audience hissed and complained and her husband went to the crying woman, eased her hands off the screen and led her away.
The screen fluttered for a few seconds more. The drummer cracked a stick against wood, a rat-tat-tat of gunfire as the bandits and the law fought in the woods.
Suddenly, a foreign man’s face filled the screen. He wore a wide-brim hat. Beneath his big butterfly mustache, his mouth was grim. He looked straight at all of them. Lin squirmed under his gaze. And then he lifted up his gun and shot. Lin dropped to the ground and covered his head. Around him, people screamed.
Ah Hsiang ran in front of the black screen and shouted, “It’s all right! It’s all right! This is only light.” He laughed. “It’s only a picture. It’s only a film. You have just witnessed the Great Train Robbery, a moving picture show.” He could barely be heard above the chatter of the audience as they recovered themselves.
Next to Lin, the projectionist laughed as he turned off the gas and the generator. Lin rose and brushed the dirt from his arms and knees.
“It happens every time,” the projectionist snickered. “Don’t cry about it. Get up there. You have to wet down the screen.”
Lin splashed water on the screen to keep it from burning up. He spotted his mother in the crowd, her face expecting his recognition, and he turned back toward his work.
The troupe stayed a week. On their final night, after the crowd had cleared, the screen had been rolled up and the projector dismantled, Ah Hsiang announced they would be moving south. He beckoned Lin into the circle and the projectionist passed him the wine bottle. He drank as if it were nothing. The other men did not degrade him with laughter. Lin laid elbows out in the dirt and looked up at the stars. He nudged his neck with his shoulder, angling at an itch. The men talked about moving pictures. Ah Hsiang wanted to be a director. The bottle came around again.
He felt the spin of the earth. When he put his head to dirt and closed his eyes, he felt himself slide to the horizon. They passed him the bottle again, the liquor emerging out of a cloud of voices. He drank. He should go home, but he couldn’t will his limbs to move. The world spun. He understood that it had been spinning since the moment of his birth, the numbers were slow in his addled mind but he came to something around 5,000 days, and it had been spinning a hundred, thousand, million days before that. It was enough to put one to sleep.
The air was, for a moment in the glimmer of pre-dawn light, cool. His clothes were damp. Ah Hsiang squatted beside him, whispering, “Lin, kid, we’re leaving. You should get home.”
He was still in the field. The camp was packed up. Only he remained on the ground, an abandoned thing. He sat up and rubbed his eyes with his palms.
“Brutal stuff if you’re not used to it. Get home. We’re leaving.”
Ah Hsiang helped him stand. Lin could smell the heat in the air, approaching, sweet with jasmine and bananas, behind the fading scent of the dead campfire and the dust. Birds cried out, and roosters in the village.
The cart rattled into motion. Lin found his legs again. He began to run. He ran across the field and to the men and the cart and buffalo. He fell in step beside Ah Hsiang.
No words between them, and Ah Hsiang did not send him away.
Shawna Yang Ryan is an award-winning Taiwanese-American novelist, short-story writer, and former creative writing professor. Ryan received an American Book Award and an Association for Asian American Studies Award for her 2016 novel GREEN ISLAND, which centers on the victims of Taiwan’s White Terror era. Her debut novel, WATER GHOSTS, is an exploration of immigrant life in a 1920s California Chinese community, blending elements of history, myth, and supernatural folklore. It was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. She is on Instagram @manuscriptdoula www.themanuscriptdoula.com.