Ahan must have been really hungry and his mind confused. The smell of the fish must have made him forget everything else. Ahan held a three-inch baby grouper, the largest on the plate, in his chopsticks.

  Peng Aqiang roared and stood up abruptly. He snatched up the plate of fish and threw the contents on the floor. He stood there still holding the dish. The room was filled with the delicious smell of the fish.

  Dexin and Desheng were just about to pick up the fish from the floor. “Grandpa, I want some to eat.”

  “No,” Peng Aqiang roared, “you are not to touch it, because it has been eaten by a beast.”

  Ahan trembled and his whole body swayed. He made a sound, turned from the table, stepped over the bench, and ran out of the house.

  “Look after Dengmei,” shouted Ahan as he rushed out the door.

  As Dengmei reached their house, Ahan came charging out of the bedroom.

  “I’m leaving,” he said in a forced tone of voice.

  “No, Ahan! Don’t go!” She was unable to stop him—Ahan avoided her grasp. She turned to pursue him, but Renhua and Renxing were there to stop her, one in front and one behind.

  “Ahan! Ahan!” she shouted.

  Ahan had already been swallowed by the dark night. Dengmei’s knees gave way and she sank to the ground.

  Like a man possessed, Liu Ahan took off down the mountain path, disregarding the dangers of an attack by the natives or a fall from a cliff in the dark. He arrived at Great Lake at cockcrow.

  When it was light, he saw many notices posted on the walls by the roadside. He could read a few words and phrases, such as “volunteer” and “Wu Tangxing, leader of the volunteers”; he had picked up a few words when he was a guard at South Lake. Without his being aware of it, his feet had carried him to the garrison located next to the Temple of the God of War at Great Lake. It was breakfast time and gruel was being served. The aroma made his stomach growl, and then he realized that he hadn’t filled his belly in several days.

  It turned out that soldiers were being recruited not to fight the natives but to battle the Japanese around Miaoli or Xinzhu.

  “The garrison at South Lake was disbanded,” said an old soldier. Ahan had hoped to get his old job back.

  “Why not sign up?” said a recruiter. “When you get to Miaoli, you’ll be given three silver dollars.”

  “Wasn’t it six dollars?”

  “You’ll get three more dollars when you’ve completed training and marched for the front line.”

  Ahan’s mind was blank, but there was a fire in his belly: he wanted to crush something, to knock something down; he saw red and wanted to kill. He signed up. The same afternoon he and about twenty other former soldiers marched for Miaoli. It was the eighth day of the eighth lunar month, the first day of autumn.

  At the beginning of the eighth month, after a break, the nine thousand Japanese troops had regrouped in four battalions. With battleship support, they moved south. The region south of Xinzhu soon fell to the Japanese forces. On the morning of the fourteenth, the Japanese army pushed toward Miaoli, west from the sea and south by land.

  Ahan and the other volunteers arrived in Miaoli on the thirteenth to a scene of total chaos as the troops prepared for the Japanese attack. The recruiting station that had been set up outside the old yamen was empty. The volunteers from Great Lake took off at once when they realized there was no hope of getting the three silver dollars owed them.

  Shaking off his sadness and anger, Ahan wondered what he should do. He tried to keep his mind off Fanzai Wood by thinking about his old home of Tongluo Bay. Wu Tangxing, the commander of the volunteers, was also a native of Tongluo. Ahan also recalled the worn and weather-beaten face of that thin, frail woman.

  He had not thought of his mother in a long, long time. He was an unfilial son. Whenever he thought of her, his heart ached. What had happened to Tongluo Bay? What had become of his mother? He couldn’t stay in Miaoli, so he started west toward the coast. He wanted to get back to Tongluo Bay and figured he could make it there before daybreak.

  Arriving in the hills to the west of Miaoli, he met six or seven men with torches. They were armed with swords and metal bars, and one of them had a bird gun. They prevented him from passing.

  “The road is cut off. The Japs are swarming all over Zhonggang.”

  “What are you doing here?” asked Ahan.

  “We’re going to fight. What are you doing?” asked one of the men. “You can’t get through. What about joining us?”

  Ahan didn’t want to join them, but the way ahead was blocked. He had to turn back. The change of guard appeared at that moment, and to Ahan’s surprise he recognized one of the former soldiers from South Lake.

  “How did you get here?” Ahan asked, smiling.

  “It’s a long story. I came with the sergeant.”

  “You mean Three Chops? Is he here?

  The soldier pointed behind him.

  “How many men are there?”

  “Six or seven hundred. You should go have a look. The Japs will attack Miaoli through the hills, maybe tonight. We might be safe if we hide in the hills.”

  Ahan was led to a large banyan tree that was used as a temple to the Earth God. Three Chops, in uniform, sat at a stone table talking.

  “Sergeant He,” said Ahan.

  Three Chops looked closely at him and then recognized him. “So it’s you. Liu Ahan, right?”

  “I never expected …”

  “To see me here. Ha ha.” Three Chops laughed till his unshaven face shook.

  Later that night, Three Chops came and woke him from his nap. “Ahan, this is one fight you don’t have to join. Lie low and take off.”

  Ahan rubbed his eyes. “Not fight? Why? Everyone else is going to fight.”

  “You are young,” Three Chops replied haltingly. “You are young and have a wife and daughter.”

  He had a wife and daughter? He stood up abruptly and with his eyes wide open said, “I want to fight! Sergeant, I just want to kill someone.”

  Three Chops was about to say something, but there was no time. Daybreak had come with the sound of cannon fire, which seemed to be getting closer.

  Three Chops gave the order to prepare for battle. He also ordered the cooks to prepare all the rice, which he then distributed to the volunteers.

  “Will we be able to hold our position?” Ahan asked a soldier beside him.

  The soldier didn’t reply but handed him a gun and asked him to fix it. It was a bird gun, one of those that had been collected from the local people. Ahan knew from experience that that type of gun tended to jam after being fired a few times. Three Chops was carrying one of the new repeating rifles.

  The red sun had risen above the peaks, accompanied by the sound of cannon fire. Below, the volunteers defending Miaoli had opened fire, but the shooting faded quickly. Gunshots were heard and yellow dust was rising along the river by Zhonggang all the way to Tortoise Mountain.

  A soldier arrived seeking orders. Were they to charge down the hill?

  “Hold your position,” ordered Three Chops. “We will wait here for the Japs to come from the sea.”

  “What if they don’t come from the sea?”

  “They will.”

  “If Miaoli is going to be lost, what is the point of waiting here?”

  Three Chops made no reply. True, if Miaoli fell, what was the point of holding the hills?

  The sun had risen high overhead. There was no movement along the road from the sea and they had received no intelligence reports about the Japanese having entered Miaoli. But sporadic gunfire continued to be heard north and east of the city.

  Suddenly Japanese soldiers appeared above them on the hill. Three Chops was the first to plunge downhill—it was each man for himself. Ahan crouched in a hollow beneath a mossy outcropping of rock. Something blocked the sunlight in front of him and he nearly let out a shout. He saw two legs bound in puttees. He knew they were not the feet of a Taiwan volunteer or those of a Qing soldier. He watched as the feet walked away, stopped, and started to turn in his direction. Holding his machete with both hands, he lunged, plunging the blade into the soldier’s belly.

  The Japanese soldier screamed, and Ahan quickly threw himself into a large clump of grass. Hitting the ground, he rolled away and crawled into another clump. At that moment a hail of bullets ripped through the first clump of grass he had landed in. He ached all over, especially in his chest and legs, but he knew it didn’t matter. His instinct for survival was heightened vividly; he was resolved to fight. He couldn’t die. He would escape. He had to live. He had to be master of the moment.

  He hid in a gully. Suddenly, a sickening smell rose around him, and he touched something sticky. It was nearly dark and he couldn’t see anything down in the gully, but he knew he that his hand was covered in fresh blood. He broke out in a cold sweat but realized that he couldn’t have lost so much blood. It must have flowed down the hill from their old position. He wondered how many of the six or seven hundred troops had been killed.

  It was August 14, the twenty-fourth day of the sixth lunar month. In the dark of night, the gunfire on the hill had ceased, and none was heard below along the road. Ahan could no longer bear the overpowering stench of the blood. He climbed out of the gully and hid in a dense tangle of creepers.

  In his knapsack he still had some of the rice he had been given, but his mouth was so dry he couldn’t eat a thing. He fell into an uneasy sleep, only to be awakened by the predawn chill; it was raining. There was not a star in the sky and the moon was a faint yellow glow behind the clouds.

  He was still alive, but he wasn’t sure how he should proceed. He wondered if Miaoli had been occupied. Then his thoughts turned to Great Lake and Fanzai Wood. He tried to avoid thinking about Fanzai Wood and shifted his thoughts to Tongluo Bay. He was concerned about the fate of his poor mother. He no longer hated her, nor did he feel any resentment; everything was fated. He felt sorry for her and wanted to kneel before her and beg forgiveness. He longed to see her. He was twenty-five and had learned something about life. He regretted the way he had treated her. From that moment on, he was preoccupied with her safety.

  The sky was gradually growing lighter. Taking advantage of the light, he made his way down the hill and took the road toward Miaoli, to hide in the hills southwest of the city. There he met with a number of his comrades who also had survived the attack, as well as some volunteers who had been defending Miaoli. He learned from them that the city had fallen the previous night. As for the volunteers on the hill, he learned that the Japanese had attacked from three sides and massacred more than four hundred. There were at least that number of corpses lying exposed on the hillside. A large number of enemy soldiers controlled the hill and shot anyone on sight.

  After a day of hunger and exhaustion, more and more people fled Miaoli. From them it was learned that the Japanese were going from house to house searching for “bandits” and any young, able-bodied men. Anyone possessing a knife, a gun, or a fishing spear was without exception taken prisoner. Ahan also learned that due to the large number of volunteers fleeing along the road to Great Lake, checks were more stringent there.

  Ahan decided to lie low for a while. He and a few others in the same situation made their way to the other side of the hill, where they built straw huts. They also collected wild herbs and fruit to assuage their hunger. On their fourth day there it began to rain, and on the fifth day, they saw a group of about forty people coming down the path from Tongluo Bay. They looked as if they had traveled a long way and staggered from exhaustion.

  They were invited to rest. All of them were old men, women, and children. They were emaciated, dirty, and ragged as a band of beggars.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Tongluo Bay,” replied a hunched-over old man.

  “What happened at Tongluo Bay?” asked Ahan, deeply concerned. “Are the Japs there?”

  “They torched almost all of the town.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “They said it was a nest of bandits and Wu Tangxing’s home.”

  Then in a flurry of voices they told about the massacre. First the Japanese had sealed off the city; then they proceeded to pour kerosene over the houses—most of which were made of bamboo and thatch—and set them on fire. The old and the very young were allowed to run away, but all young men were bound and blindfolded and taken to the open space in front of the Matsu temple. The Japs then asked a volunteer by the name of Wu, whom they had taken prisoner, to point out the “bandits.” “Each young man was led before him and he was asked by a Jap who spoke our language if he was a bandit. If Wu nodded his head, the young man was taken to the edge of the river, where he was beheaded. If he shook his head, the prisoner was released. Wu realized this, so he just kept shaking his head. Then the Japs got pissed and started beating him on the head with a stick. Unable to bear the pain, he started nodding his head.”

  “Then all of them must have been killed.”

  “Almost all of them,” replied an old woman. “When we stole quietly out of the town we saw …”

  “What did you see?”

  “The river that passes through Tongluo was flowing red with blood.”

  At that point they all sighed and fell silent, staring blankly ahead. In the quiet, their thoughts turned to their own sons and husbands. They began to cry one by one.

  Ahan had a strange feeling and his heart leaped. He couldn’t think, but his heart reverberated with a familiar cry. He had been having these feelings for days, but never stronger than the previous night. What did they signify? He felt he was on the verge of understanding, but at the bottom of his heart he really didn’t want to know. Listening to these people, his own compatriots who had fled as refugees, he wondered if the Japanese intended to kill all Taiwanese who resisted them. They had not killed the young and old, nor the women. When he thought of the women a cold shudder ran down his back.

  “Hey, aren’t you …?” an old woman with thin white hair asked Ahan.

  “What? My name is Liu Ahan.”

  “Ahan! Of course. You came to ask me to witness your marriage.”

  “Auntie Agui, is that you?” he asked, suddenly recognizing her.

  A smile started to appear on her wrinkled face but then froze. She looked down. “Oh, child.”

  “What is it, Auntie Agui?” He thought for a moment and then was nearly overcome. He rushed forward, grabbed the old woman’s arm, and shook it. “It’s not true, it can’t be.”

  Auntie Agui glanced up at him.

  “It can’t be. Didn’t you say the women were not harmed?” he asked, seeking to deny any possibility that she might have been hurt.

  “That Xu Ameng.”

  “What about Xu Ameng?” Xu Ameng was his mother’s husband.

  “Beheaded. He was probably the fifth one.”

  He screwed up his courage and asked, “What about my mother?”

  “Your mother is fine. Nothing happened to her.”

  “Hey, wasn’t Ameng’s wife the one that was shot when she tried to put out the fire?” interjected a small, thin woman.

  “What? Did you say she was shot?” Ahan turned toward Auntie Agui. “Tell me! Is it true?”

  Auntie Agui nodded and looked at him with pity in her eyes.

  He didn’t believe them! They didn’t know what they were saying. His mother couldn’t be dead. They were so scared they didn’t know what they had seen. They were talking nonsense. He didn’t believe them. He denied it over and over. “I don’t believe it,” he roared. “I’m going to find her.”

  He thrust a knife someone had left lying on the ground into his belt. His eyes burning, he stared at everyone, then set off down the hill. He was quite clear and rational. Avoiding the main road to Tongluo Bay, he took paths through the hills instead. Brushing aside the branches across the paths and avoiding the thorns, he boldly but cautiously made his way to Tongluo Bay.

  The evening sky was a deep orange color by the time Ahan had stealthily made his way to Tongluo Bay by way of the hill paths. Located on the west central coast of Taiwan, Tongluo Bay had been one of the earliest Hakka settlements on the island. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides. From the beginning of winter to the end of spring, the town was shrouded in a thick fog every morning and evening. That year, the fog was especially thick and moved in more quickly than usual. Ahan saw that a dense curtain of fog had completely covered the houses, roofs, and thorny hedges, and those unforgettable longan trees. The air was filled with the acrid smell of the burned town and a faint stench of blood.

  He strode into the darkening fog to his heartbreaking old home. Desperately but fearfully trying to verify what had happened, Ahan forgot that Japanese soldiers might be waiting in ambush. The sky was dark, and there were no lights by which to orient himself. But it was impossible for him to lose his way—he simply let his feet guide him. He headed in the direction of the village center. He couldn’t see clearly, but it seemed that the little shop and tea pavilion had changed and that nothing remained but tumbled-down walls. The wood smoke was so thick he nearly choked. He neared the end of the village and turned up the slope. His home, that mud-walled cottage, was there. When he had come back five years ago, and later to offer sacrifices to his ancestors, this had been his first stop. Only a portion of the walls remained standing, and the roof had fallen in—no, it had been burned off.

  He wondered if there was anyone left alive in the village with whom he could talk. He thought of the big brick house that belonged to the most senior member of the Liu clan, his uncle Bingrong. The village was small and he quickly located the house. The two-storied main hall could be seen even in the dark. Wisps of black smoke rose from the still-smoldering house timbers.