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clearly tried to mend themselves. Seeing loose chickens in the street, they lunged after them, pots and pans clanging together.
    A chicken scampered between my legs, and I leaped back, falling onto the dusty road. A man stepped on my toes with his boot and nearly hit me in the face with a frying pan.
    I scrambled to get up, but when I did, I held an upside-down, empty rucksack, and the man who had given chase to the chicken was holding The Earth.
    “My book!” I yelled at the ragged man.
    “Be quiet, young man!” someone whispered behind me. “He’s a soldier.”
    “A soldier?” I stared at the man’s rotten teeth, his hollow cheeks. This could not possibly be a soldier. Soldiers were terrifying men who wore crisp uniforms and marched in formation. They might demand a chicken, but they would never stoop so low as to chase one in the street.
    The man did not hear me, and if he had, he most certainly would not have understood me, as he was shouting and pointing at my book in a language I had never heard. His words swooped and chopped, his face grew red, and he waved my precious book in the air, marking the cover with his dirty thumb.
    “It’s mine,” I said, reaching for the book.
    He struck my hand back and grabbed me by the arm. He smelled like the goats on the farm near my parents’ country house. I heard him say something that sounded like “ Fujian ren, ” and he dragged me into the street where the rest of the men still ambled by.
    “Ow!” I struggled to loosen his grip on my arm.
    The man waved down another man who wore no yoke around his neck and appeared of higher rank. I felt a shock as I realized that this actually was an army and that this second man was an officer.
    This officer bent down to me, his hollow-cheeked mouth forming words that were comprehensibly Taiwanese, though with a very odd accent. I would understand later that he must have been from the province of our ancestors, Fujian.
    “What is your name? Why do you have a Japanese book?”
    I began to shake. I had never been face-to-face with a soldier. I had always run from the Japanese soldiers, like everyone else. Any kind of contact with a soldier was sure to bring dire consequences.
    “My name,” I said, my mouth sticking together, “is Sa—”
    “His name is Tong Chia-lin.” My father pulled up at my side, his jacket unbuttoned to reveal his ever-present bow tie and the expanse of shirt over his belly. His eyes were cold and fearless. I had never heard the name he had just called me, ever. I looked up at him in amazement.
    The soldier straightened up, chastised by my father’s aura of authority. “You’re his father?”
    “I am,” my father said, and he glanced at me in a way that made it clear he was not entirely happy about that fact.
    “Excuse me, Mr. Tong, but a soldier in my troop found your boy hiding this book.” He held up The Earth.
    “Sir,” my father said. There was just the faintest trace of derisiveness in his tone that only those who knew him well would recognize. “That is a textbook. We have been occupied by Japan for fifty years and all our textbooks are in Japanese.”
    The officer looked down at the book. He opened it and looked down with disgust at the mixture of kanji and hiragana. “What if I don’t believe you?” he said. He turned the page, and there was an illustration of the solar system.
    “You see?” My father pointed at the picture and, at the same time, deftly dropped a small red envelope—the kind people used for New Year’s money—on top of it. “The solar system.”
    The officer quickly pocketed the envelope and closed the book with a snap. “I see that it is a textbook. You may keep it. Forgive my mistake.”
    As my father’s hand closed around the book, relief and gratitude flooded through me. I reached for the book. “ Otosan! ”
    In the same instant that I cried out, the soldier was called away, hurrying after the last of the soldiers. The crowd, silent and shocked by