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Even the Japanese were beginning to concede to our demands.”
    “Yes.” My father’s face was dark and mirthless as he shrugged off the magistrate’s hand. “But Chiang Kai-shek is a general, not a monk. He won the whole of China before he lost it to the Communists. And he did not win it by asking politely.”
    My father slammed the door shut, and the magistrate, smiling and shaking his head, walked around to climb into the driver’s seat. The windows were open and my father’s voice carried through the air.
    “Think,” he said. “Chiang’s Nationalists have been brutalized not only by the Communists but also by the Japanese, and here we drink sake and sleep on tatami. The West has given Taiwan to the Nationalists to punish Japan, not because Chiang Kai-shek loves us.”
    The truck started up, and my father’s words rose over the roaring of the engine.
    “Only a child believes his rulers have his best interest at heart,” he said. “We would be wise to disabuse ourselves of such illusions.”
    W E WERE UNLOADED onto a set of tiered platforms in the downtown section of Chungcheng Road, with my father joining the magistrate and members of the town assembly at the top. There were three chairs sitting on the lower platform where my brothers and sisters had been deposited, and they quickly busied themselves squabbling over whether the oldest or the youngest should get to sit. Only Jiro stood looking down the street, a fearful expression on his face.
    I looked down over the crowd standing on the sidewalk around us. The populace of Taoyuan lined either side of the street, waving red-and-blue Nationalist flags and scarlet banners saying WELCOME, GENERALISSIMO CHIANG ! Though in fact only Governor Chen Yi and his troops were coming today.
    And then I saw Yoshiko.
    She was standing on the other side of Chungcheng Road at the front of a crowd, all of whom were peering down the street for their first glimpse of the Nationalist Chinese soldiers. Her face was obscured by the wide brim of a hat trimmed with blue ribbons, but I could tell it was her by the way she stood—feet together, inclining her head with a polite, expectant air—and the way she held, on one side, her brother’s hand, and on the other side what I took to be her father’s. The three of them were easily among the handsomest and most finely dressed of the crowd. Her father was slim and dapper in an elegant, well-tailored suit with a silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. His teeth flashed with a smile as he bent to talk to Yoshiko. Her brother was a young man now, as tall and handsome as his father, laughing and patting Yoshiko on the head as she pointed down the road. Yoshiko’s white dress, trimmed with blue ribbons to match her hat, billowed out into her brother’s fine dress pants in the light breeze.
    “Oh, look!” I heard a man near me say to his friend. “There’s Frog Face with his daughter.”
    “The guy who owns the Tiger Café? With that girl in the white?”
    “I don’t see his wife—”
    They chuckled together.
    I wanted so much to talk to Yoshiko. Had she seen the world? Was she no longer poor? I jumped down from the platform onto the sidewalk.
    Gasps and quiet cries of surprise arose around me, and I caught my breath. Had I done something wrong? I looked around in alarm, but no one was paying attention to me. They were straining to look at something in the street, and in the general commotion I squeezed through the dress suits, the lace-trimmed sleeves, the embroidered silk cheongsams from Shanghai, and the traditional Chinese dress robes released from decades of storage and emerged at the front of the crowd.
    There was no question of crossing the street to get to Yoshiko; groups of bedraggled men now strolled down the road, pots and pans dangling from yokes around their necks. Cooks or servants for the soldiers, I thought. The men were gaunt, their clothes faded, with sloppy white stitches meandering across holes they had