Hijewel's Views and Stories

A Veteran’s Death and His Home Sweet (about 3000 words)

Our large courtyard stood at the intersection of two lanes, set diagonally across the corner, so its red gate was almost twice as wide as those of our neighbors. This made our house a favorite among the neighborhood children, especially when the gate swung wide open with a loud, grinding clatter to let a light-blue automobile slowly drive in. 

As children gathered to watch the spectacle, adults passing by would stop and stare. There was always some wise man ready with an explanation: “The car must have been left behind by the American military headquarters.” 

It was not such a far-fetched guess in those days. Cars were still a rare sight in residential neighborhoods and big cars seemed to belong to another world; if one suddenly appeared in our neighborhood, people naturally assumed that the Americans had something to do with it. 

The driver, a short, stout man, stepped out of the car and walked around to open the passenger-side door. General Hsu then emerged—tall, broad-shouldered, his back still straight despite his age, and, as always, wearing his military cap.

“He is a very respectable man,” my father always said. The General had been sent to Germany to study the art of tank warfare, and was later honored as the father of the Republic of China’s tank corps. Now he lives in Taiwan comfortably and became a landlord, our landlord.” 

Once General Hsu began making his rounds like a landlord, Driver Wang and our doorman, Chu—both of whom had once served under him—would quietly disappear into the leafy vineyard. 

At the end of the vineyard stood a shed where my brother tried his first cigarette. When our doorman found out and warned my parents of the danger of smoking there, my brother was punished in the most Chinese way imaginable: he had to copy Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s will one hundred times.

 Xxx

One of my happiest childhood memories was when Aunt Liu, whose family shared the other side of our two-home unit, made her most famous dessert—osmanthus muffins. Their kitchen was a casual bamboo addition, anything but scentproof. I would linger at her kitchen door, opening my nose to the delicious smell, hoping for the best. And luckily, she might give me one. 

It may have been a dream, or simply the wit of a child. After all, I had been reading Sherlock Holmes. Somehow, I began to see a connection between the smell of Aunt Liu’s osmanthus muffins and Driver Wang’s appearance. He came to our house quite often to fix small things—pipes, beams, and whatever else needed fixing—usually on his own, in that big light-blue car. 

My habit of observation all began in that summer vacation when I spent almost every waking hour reading Sherlock Holmes. When I finally looked up from the book, I began to see our house, the courtyard, the adults and children, and their comings and goings in a different way. For example, I began to notice Aunt Liu’s slender figure wrapped in a fitted, tight-waisted robe, with high slits on either side. Even at eleven, I knew an attractive woman when I saw one. 

It started out that Wang left his tool at our house after he fixed our toilet. I ran out with the tool to find him, but he was not inside his car or in the yard. I walked around the yard and heard a man and a woman talking in the bamboo kitchen, and the fresh smell of the osmanthus filled up my senses. 

I went in and returned the tool to him. He picked up a piece of the hot muffin from the plate and handed it to me. “Here’s the girl who loves to read and just won a district-wide writing competition,” Aunt Niu said. 

“Very impressed, Miss Writer. Now tell me, how would you describe these delicious osmanthus muffins Mrs. Niu made? Let me give you a hint: they capture the wholesome taste of my faraway mainland homeland of rivers, paddy fields and osmanthus blossoms—the one and only delicacy of the Southern Land of Riverways.”

I flushed, touched that he trusted me to find the right words. I had never imagined that an old veteran driver could say things so beautifully. 

After that, once I started paying attention, the pattern became hard to miss. Wang would appear, the osmanthus muffins would be steaming in the pot and the smell mixed with air, and there he was, with his tools—as a handyman, of course—in the bamboo kitchen. 

If not for what happened later, I would have thought nothing of it. Everything seemed perfectly normal and innocent. After all, the bamboo kitchen was fragile by nature. It had collapsed in the last typhoon and needed constant maintenance. The muffins were simply a housewife’s most convenient reward for Wang’s kindness and handyman skills. 

 Xxx 

Our big yard included a small vineyard, where the landlord grew grapes to make his own liquor. At the far end stood a little shed with a corrugated-iron roof. It was where my brother tried his first cigarette, and where Driver Wang and Doorman Chu had a mysterious habit of disappearing whenever I happened to be looking. 

On the last weekend of August, it seemed that all the children gathered in front of the red gate to welcome the American car, as if marking the end of a happy summer. The brave and naughty ones would follow the adults into the vineyard to steal some grapes, for it was rare that Doorman Chu ever left the vineyard unlocked.

Then came the ritual. Under our curious eyes, they rolled a round tank out of the shed and trundled it over to the light-blue American car. Then, with faces full of admiration, the children watched Wang perform his much-loved trick. He opened the gasoline drum, inserted one end of a rubber hose, put the other end into his mouth, and sucked hard. Then he made a loud “whoosh” sound and lowered the hose into a small basin at his feet. 

At that moment, the liquid began to gurgle out, and the smell of gasoline filled the air. I took several deep breaths and remembered that smell forever. Perhaps that is why I grew up loving the smell of gasoline. 

As Wang poured the gasoline into the car’s gas tank, he chose my brother and his friend to roll the drum back into the shed, which made the boys grin with pride.

“Don’t you youngsters ever, ever smoke near the shed. Do you understand?” His face suddenly turned serious. 

Then he climbed into the driver’s seat, ready to leave. Meanwhile, I heard Aunt Niu’s high-pitched voice, even above the sound of the engine starting. “I’ve prepared the muffins for you. Don’t let them get cold!” 

Wang jumped out of the car, and they hurried into the bamboo kitchen. The children didn’t wait a minute to jostle one another for the privilege of being the stand-in driver. Chizai got the honor. With the engine still roaring, he pressed down on the gas pedal for the very first time. 

The car lurched forward, shot through the open red gate, with children shouting and scattering around it, and crashed into a neighbor’s stone wall before it stopped. In that instant, I saw two figures thrown into the air. They landed. One got up. The other did not. 

I was terrified. 

Our dog Tigery ran back and barked furiously at the bamboo kitchen. Wang rushed, followed by Aunt Niu. The moment Wang realized that a child had been hit, his face turned pale. 

I knew the girl. She was nine years old and had been known as the “dumb girl” long before anyone used the word autism. She had obviously wandered into the group of “wild boys” and was probably being bullied by some of them. I had tried to talk to her whenever I saw her on the street, but she never answered or even looked at me. Her eyes were round, big and blank, always turned somewhere else, and her movements were slow and clumsy. 

She would never have survived the accident if someone had not pushed her aside. Oh, that someone was my brother! My naughty, troublemaking sibling, three years older than me. 

My brother stood trembling, while the girl he had saved lay unconscious beside his feet, blood streaking her arms. 

At dinner that evening, my father praised him for what he had done, and later that night, he acted awkwardly, probably from hearing something new, and even strange, about himself. 

For as long as I had lived with him, I had never heard a good word about my brother from my father. He was the troublemaker, the headache, and never a model for his younger siblings. 

That night, my brother flew his paper airplanes at me incessantly, until I was in tears. What was he doing? I wonder now. Was he trying to put an end to an era by leaving behind the beloved things of his boyhood? Unfortunately, in childhood, whenever he needed a target, I was there. 

Whether that wounded girl ever regained consciousness, I never knew. Her family soon moved away, quietly, without bothering anyone.

The rumors were endless:

The child died. The child lived. The child was on life support. The child became even more disabled than before. The child became normal after the trauma, as if she had been given a new brain. The family moved overseas to seek better treatment. The family moved to a remote countryside to escape the harmful world. 

Opinions were even more revealing:

Some praised the family’s silence and forgiveness, with a touch of irony: “For ordinary people who have to make ends meet, walking away is the best policy. What else can they do?”

Others saw it as a matter of class: “A rich landlord on one side, a poor family on the other. General Hsu would use all his power to protect his driver—and his own good name. The poor family could only accept their fate." 

Some encouraged them to take the matter to court: “Sue Wang and his employer, just as they would in the United States. We are not powerless idiots.”

But one comment left a scar on my young mind: “Suppose the girl is dead. Perhaps it would be a blessing for her poor parents. How could they possibly raise a half-brained child?”

Xxx 

After that incident, I never saw Wang again. The new driver was very mean to us and would chase us away with an imaginary long gun. The shed was still there, and so was the gasoline drum, but the vineyard remained locked and untouched until the next harvest season. 

When the school writing assignment was “a subject of your own choice,” I wrote a short essay about osmanthus muffins: 

For Driver Wang, the osmanthus muffins were more than muffins made with osmanthus blossoms. They were the taste of home—a home he had left behind because of the Civil War. They were light yellow, square, and sprinkled with tiny osmanthus petals, like little flowers scattered across a field. When I put one in my mouth, it was soft and moist, but never sticky. The delicate floral fragrance lingered long after the muffin was gone. It was the one and only delicacy of the Land of Rivers and Blossoms.

xxx 

In mid-September, on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the moon shone in the dark sky like a bright white plate of jade. The shadows on its surface were said to be a man and his rabbit, while the old legend told of Chang’e, a beautiful fairy who flew to the moon after swallowing the wrong kind of medicine. 

That night, our family of five and the Niu family of eight brought out all the rattan chairs and crowded around a small round table piled high with all kinds of snacks and desserts. Besides the traditional mooncakes, there were, by popular demand, Aunt Niu’s signature osmanthus muffins. 

The oldest adult, the grandfather of the Niu’s, said something in his dialect, which I didn’t understand a word at all. One night, I heard a scream and saw this old man lying on the porch struggling, as if fighting for his life. “He still has nightmares about escaping from the Communists before a bloodshed,” my mother told me then. 

Then my eyes turned to Aunt Niu. My parents said she had been a beauty. When the family’s eldest son met her as they were fleeing south, they fell in love and married. They had four children, and unlike most mothers I knew, she had managed to keep her figure slim and graceful. She was attractive. 

That evening, she was wearing a casual blouse and skirt. Sitting in her rattan chair, as she often did, she bent both legs over the edge, settling into a comfortable, relaxed position that left nearly half her bare legs exposed.

At eleven, I had already developed a certain sense of what was prim and proper. Something about the sight made me uneasy. At least, it was not how my mother had taught me a good girl should sit when boys were around. 

Such a night was made for nostalgia, and nothing else. They remembered the dances and songs in Shanghai’s Western-style dance halls, even as Japanese bombs fell outside; the small towns that the Nationalists and Communists fought over so often that the winner could become the loser, and the loser the winner, within a single day; the madness of war, the innocence of its casualties, and the pain carried by those who survived. 

They remembered beautiful rivers shrouded in morning mist, and spring teas made fragrant by the lingering winter fog. They remembered fallen leaves and snow-covered mountains—things Taiwan, a subtropical island, could not give them—and all the cuisines of their lost homeland, flavors that, in their memories, humbled even the best of Taiwanese cooking. 

They had built families, found jobs, and made homes in Taiwan. But somewhere deep inside, they had never arrived. And we, their children, listened every day to their dialects and fond memories of a lost land. Their nostalgia seeped into us, too, until it became part of who we were. 

Sighs and laughter mingled. The children listened and understood more than the adults might have imagined. The moon climbed higher, then began its slow descent. 

“I wonder where Driver Wang is tonight. Has anyone heard from him?” Mr. Niu asked.

 “All I know is that General Hsu fired him. He had to. Leaving the car running while he went inside was unforgivable for a driver. What could have possessed him at the time? Fortunately, nothing was damaged except the stone wall and the car,” my father said.

 “And that girl. She was knocked unconscious. Poor thing. I wonder where she is now,” my mother said.

“Perhaps it’s better not to know. Let things be. We have enough to worry about in our own lives.” 

 “I once saw Wang sleeping in the ruined temple near the rice paddy…” 

 “You don’t mean he became, homeless?”

 “I’m not sure. He must have picked up some skills in the army to make a meager living, Or perhaps, like some other veterans we know, he catches songbirds in the mountains and sells them to bird lovers. Or cook the food of his homeland for people who miss it.”

“I do miss him,” Mr. Niu said. “If not for him, our bamboo kitchen wouldn’t have lasted this long. My wife told me he used to come by and repair things here and there. Ah, another typhoon is coming…” 

I looked at Aunt Niu. She lowered her legs, stood up, picked up the full ashtray, and went inside.

I knew what had drawn Wang back to the kitchen that day: the osmanthus muffins she had made for him. Usually, they stayed together for twenty minutes or so, talking and laughing. I knew because I paid attention. 

And I also knew that I must keep their twenty minutes together a secret. Otherwise, all hell might break loose. 

“Loneliness is their worst enemy,” my mother said. “I do hope he finds a wife. There’s nothing like the happiness and security of having a home, even if only for a little while.” 

Years later, when I remembered the mingled scents of gasoline and osmanthus, I began to wonder whether Wang had found his own little piece of home in that kitchen. For some twenty minutes, he could be the man of the house, fixing home items while a woman prepared his favorite food. Perhaps they were drawn to each other. Perhaps they even felt something for each other. There was no need to give it a name. Sometimes, the atmosphere itself worked its magic, making something fleeting feel real. 

And she, an attractive woman, did not mind exposing her bare legs while sitting, could allow herself a little more freedom—a little more laughter, a little more warmth, a little more of the woman in her. 

In that small bamboo kitchen, amid the fragrance of the muffins, Wang might have found some warmth and pleasure in lives otherwise marked by loss. 

Perhaps those twenty minutes were the happiest of Wang’s life. If so, I’m very happy for him. 

It wasn’t until I studied physics and chemistry in junior high school that I learned the name for Wang’s magic trick of sucking gasoline through a hose: the siphon effect. 

Wang died two years later. My father insisted that it was the gasoline he had sucked into his mouth that killed him. 

The bamboo kitchen collapsed in the next typhoon. Unable to afford a sturdier replacement, the Niu family moved away.