The Third Son by Julie Wu Read Free Book Online

windows at soldiers who lived in a blocked-off section of our school. Some sat on beds of rags, smoking. Others stripped our classrooms of shelving, lighting, the very outlets from the walls. They sold these things, I heard. They sold everything they could remove except for our Japanese textbooks. These they set fire to in the courtyard, along with our desks, cooking over them in huge blackened woks and squatting to eat on the ground, like the poorest of beggars.
    In the streets, sirens wailed, signaling bank robberies and the looting of stores and factories. Toru’s own clinic was looted for stomach powders and antibiotics.
    Once, I passed a grocery store where sacks of rice, barley, and sweet potatoes were piled outside the door. A small crowd had gathered and a small, wild-looking woman fended them off.
    “I paid good money for these! They cost one hundred of those new dollars. My son’s upstairs, but he’ll be right down to carry these inside, so don’t get any ideas.”
    “He’s too sick, Ma!” A girl’s voice called from inside the house.
    “What are you talking about!” The woman wrung her hands, standing in front of the sacks. Her cheekbones were sharp and there were hollows beneath. “Well, my other son will be back any minute now.”
    Why didn’t anyone help her?
    “I’ll carry them in,” I said. Then, as I went to pick up a sack of rice, I saw that three men in the front of the crowd wore Nationalist uniforms. My heart flip-flopped, but I couldn’t fathom how helping this woman with her own rice could be wrong, so I kept my head down and carried the heavy sacks in, one by one.
    “ Chit pieng. Here.” The woman pointed me toward the dusty, empty shelves. Inside, she whispered, “You see those pigs think they can just take what they want.”
    The crowd broke apart and I left the store as quickly as I could. I heard a voice call out from the second-floor window, but I was too scared to look back.
    T HROUGH THE MONTHS that Taiwan sank into chaos, I continued to steal into Kazuo’s room. He had a tutor to help him prepare for his high school entrance examinations, and as their voices sounded in the kitchen, I stood by his bookshelf flipping through The Earth. I didn’t dare sit, for fear of leaving traces of my presence on his chair or futon. It was in Kazuo’s room one day, as I carefully pushed The Earth back onto its shelf so the spine lined up with the others, that I saw a sheet of paper on his desk. It was set in the middle, as though it were especially important.
Examinations to Determine Eligibility to Pursue Graduate Study in the United States take place yearly in October. The top twelve scorers in the country will be allowed to apply for a United States student visa. Subjects to include English, mathematics, physics, history, biology, chemistry . . .
    Scrawled across the top of the announcement was a handwritten note:
    No one’s passed from Taoyuan County. Let’s be the first!—Li-wen
    And at that moment, looking down at Kazuo’s fine, neat desk, surrounded by the handsome screened windows facing the courtyard and the stacks of new, folded clothes I would someday get thirdhand, I knew what I had to do. I would take that examination. I would beat Kazuo to America.
    T ORU HAD BEEN right: academic success could be my ticket to see the world. And I needed to make up for lost time. The Taiwanese education system was rigidly tiered. All the students who had passed the American entrance exam had graduated from one school—Taiwan University, unequivocally the best school on the island. If I wanted to get into Taiwan University, I had to go to the top high school, and if I wanted to go to the top high school, I had to go to the top middle school. There was no dodging this tracking system. One misstep now would send me down a lesser path, and I would never get the education I needed to pass the most difficult exam in Taiwan.
    And so when the time neared for my middle school entrance exams, for