The Third Son by Julie Wu Read Free Book Online Page B

shuttled from our regular classroom into the newly constructed wing of the school.
    It was the first Friday I was actually prepared for our test, and Teacher Lee was late. The principal—a Mainlander, of course, like all our teachers—poked his head in and said in his usual severe way that Teacher Lee was at a special teachers’ meeting and that we must wait patiently and cause no trouble or we would be in trouble ourselves. As we waited for him, my classmates talked, louder and louder, our voices deadening in the still-drying walls of cement that surrounded us.
    “What can the teachers be talking about all this time?”
    “Whatever those Mainland pigs talk about. Who knows?”
    “You’d better be quiet!”
    “Why? We’re all sweet potatoes here—we’re all Taiwanese.”
    “It smells like cow dung in here.”
    “Did you hear about that woman selling cigarettes?”
    “Didn’t she die—”
    “No, I heard they shot into the crowd and killed people that way.”
    “Did you see that banner?”
    I went to the wall, stuck my finger in it, and dragged my finger through the mixture of mud and rice straw, tracing out a square Mainlander face with a round nose and a single hair growing out of the chin. “Teacher Lee,” I said. I curved out my line to make the potbelly.
    Everyone burst out laughing behind me, and I smiled, enjoying the feeling of being liked, the center of attention.
    Soon others joined me at the wall. “Is it okay to draw here?”
    “Sure,” I said. “They’ll just put plaster over this. Usually they just score the wall with bamboo branches. The drawings will do the same thing and help it stick.”
    The smooth surface of the wall disappeared under googly-eyed faces and B-29 bombers. I laughed, jubilant at the sensation of being for once in the thick of a group rather than on the fringes. And then suddenly, footsteps sounded on the plywood outside our classroom door.
    We tripped over each other, scurrying to our seats.
    The door opened, and Teacher Lee appeared—bald, his brow furrowed, his nose bulbous and red. “Rise,” he said, walking to his desk, and we all stood.
    “Good morning, Teacher Lee,” we chanted in Mandarin.
    “Sit.”
    And it was at that point, when we had all sat back down and he turned to the chalkboard, that his eyes widened. He walked slowly around the classroom, looking at the walls. He stopped in front of my drawing of him, and I saw, with a mingling of pride and fear, that my classmates had given it a fairly wide margin in their own doodlings.
    But could it be? The nose I had drawn looked just like a pig’s snout. How could I possibly have drawn such a thing on a day like today? I hoped desperately that he would think it was something else, a caricature of some other person.
    Teacher Lee’s ears turned red. For several agonizing moments he said nothing but only stared at my drawing, nostrils flaring, belly heaving.
    Then he turned to us. “Who has done this?”
    I looked at his face, flushed and twisted. I could not have drawn his nose any other way.
    I stood. I was in the front, as we had been seated by exam score, and I knew my classmates would stand up also, because everyone had drawn on the wall and all we had to do was explain.
    But then I saw that only one other boy, the one directly behind me, was standing, too. He sniffled, eyes watery and terrified as he wiped them on his sleeve.
    My mouth went dry. I felt a rushing sound in my ears. Yet still I felt, if only I could just explain how the wall was constructed. My teacher was an intelligent, educated man, but he was a gua shing-a —a Mainlander—and Mainlanders did not seem to understand how things operated. They ran wires across railroad tracks. They ran flat tires into the ground. They gathered in groups to gawk at elevators. “Teacher Lee,” I said, facing him, “the walls are not actually ruined. All the pictures will disappear. You see, they put plaster over—”
    “Tong Chia-lin,” he said