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the parade of bedraggled soldiers, began dispersing, their welcome banners slack.
    My father whirled to face me, bending so his face was close to mine, his eyes menacing. “Fool!” he whispered. “Don’t you ever talk to me in Japanese in public again. In front of a Nationalist soldier!” He tucked the book under his arm and grabbed my elbow. “I will burn this stupid book when we get home!”
    “No!”
    He dragged me back to the truck, his fingertips digging so hard into my arm that my eyes watered and I knew there would be marks for days.
    Why my one book? Our house was filled with Japanese books. They were on every shelf, in every book bag. That book was the one thing I owned that mattered at all. My throat swelled, but I took a deep breath. I was twelve years old and I didn’t want to give my father and my brothers the satisfaction of seeing me beg and bawl like a baby.
    I climbed onto the truck bed and squeezed again between Jiro and Mariko, who complained that I was wrinkling her skirt. Jiro turned to me, eyebrows lightly furrowed. “What happened?”
    I wanted to answer, but my throat was still swollen.
    Kazuo was standing by the truck with my father. “Nice job, rice-for-brains,” he said to me. And then, to my father: “How did you know what to do?”
    My father grunted. “These people are obviously desperate and corrupt. There’s only one way to deal with people like that.”
    Kazuo chuckled, shaking his head. He put out his hand. “I’d like to have that book,” he said.
    My father handed it to him. “It interests you?”
    Kazuo leafed through it. “It does.”
    “Keep it, then.”
    “Hey!” I jumped to my feet and nearly fell over the side of the truck. “That’s my—”
    “Shut up!” my father barked up at me. “You’ve caused enough trouble today.”
    I sat down.
    Kazuo climbed up onto the truck bed and smirked, brandishing the book and then sitting on top of it, right in front of me. “That’s better. And now you’ll have no more advantage, little boy.”
    “That’s not fair,” Jiro whispered to me, his eyes wide. “That was yours.”
    I was breathing so hard I had a stitch in my side. I would sooner have burned the book than give it to Kazuo. “I’ll get even with him someday,” I said under my breath. “Someday I’ll—”
    I stopped, remembering to look back at the street.
    Yoshiko and her family were gone.

6
    I WAS FOR A time consumed by feelings of helplessness and rage. Walking by Kazuo’s room, I could see The Earth, shelved between his geometry and physical science textbooks . Kazuo never read the book, to my knowledge. For him it was a trophy, an assurance that he retained his superiority.
    I could simply have taken it back. But since my mishandling of it had caused so much trouble, and since my father had in fact taken a great risk in retrieving the book from that Nationalist officer, I did not feel justified in taking it back. I was lucky enough that my father had punished me only in this way. At least The Earth was safe in our house. I tried to be satisfied with stealing into Kazuo’s room when he was not there and flipping the book open, its pages fluttering in the breeze that passed through the large screened windows of his room.
    Reading the book was a balm for me through all the changes in the world outside. The Taiwanese textbooks we had studied between the Japanese departure and the Chinese takeover had been swept aside, and I was now called by that strange name, Tong Chia-lin. Outside, we were once again forbidden to speak our own language and forced instead to speak a foreign language. This time it was Mandarin Chinese, the four tones of which—as opposed to the eight of Taiwanese, the atonality of Japanese—we were still training our ears to recognize. We chanted, “ Bo po mo fo, ” and recited Chinese nursery tales in our cracking preadolescent voices. Between classes, I stole off to clamber up piles of hacked-up desks and peer through the