Green Island
A novel
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4.8 • 17 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Shawna Yang Ryan’s propulsive storytelling carries us through a bloody time in Taiwanese history, its implications still reverberating today. The story is haunted by questions about whether Taiwan is a part of China or its own country, what the costs are of standing up for one’s beliefs and by the choices made by one father and his daughter. Green Island is a tough, unsentimental and moving novel that is a memorial not only to the heroes, but also to the survivors.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
A stunning story of love, betrayal, and family, set against the backdrop of a changing Taiwan over the course of the twentieth century.
February 28, 1947: Trapped inside the family home amid an uprising that has rocked Taipei, Dr. Tsai delivers his youngest daughter, the unnamed narrator of Green Island, just after midnight as the city is plunged into martial law. In the following weeks, as the Chinese Nationalists act to crush the opposition, Dr. Tsai becomes one of the many thousands of people dragged away from their families and thrown into prison. His return, after more than a decade, is marked by alienation from his loved ones and paranoia among his community—conflicts that loom over the growing bond he forms with his youngest daughter. Years later, this troubled past follows her to the United States, where, as a mother and a wife, she too is forced to decide between what is right and what might save her family—the same choice she witnessed her father make many years before.
As the novel sweeps across six decades and two continents, the life of the narrator shadows the course of Taiwan’s history from the end of Japanese colonial rule to the decades under martial law and, finally, to Taiwan’s transformation into a democracy. But, above all, Green Island is a lush and lyrical story of a family and a nation grappling with the nuances of complicity and survival, raising the question: how far would you be willing to go for the ones you love?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ryan (Water Ghosts) reshapes the immigrant tale in this precise and poetic work. The book garners depth from its ambitious desire to take on rather than sidestep the shifting political climate of its Taiwanese landscape. The unnamed narrator is born in 1947 at the start of a government-led massacre in Taipei, and she enters into a turbulent time of lies and violence one she seems incapable of escaping no matter how far she goes from her home. She settles years later in California. Though in her youth she questions the betrayal her father makes in order to protect his family, she finds herself confronting the same problem as an adult. The vigilant government seeks to silence all critique of the dictatorial regime; it threatens her safety and that of her children, leading to a loss that even her past cannot prepare her for. "How far back would my wishes have to go to erase all of it?" she thinks. First through the experiences of the narrator's birth family in Taiwan, and then through the gaze of the family she creates in Berkeley with her activist husband, Ryan grants readers a closer look at the deep connections between familial love and the inescapability of history, both personal and political. This is a significant work, full of carefully researched detail that results in a moving and indelible story.
Customer Reviews
A literary earthquake
Shawna Yang Ryan's dazzling 'Green Island' tasks itself with nothing less than the crafting of a nuanced domestic drama, the vivid imagining of a sixty-year political history, and the taking of a clear-eyed look at the many kinds of destruction visited upon individuals by the times and places to which they belong. To these challenges (and far, far above them) 'Green Island' rises beautifully.
The aforementioned political history belongs to Taiwan, and the family we witness sharing in its many upheavals is the Tsai's. The novel opens with the birth of the narrator--an event that coincides with the advent of the nation's strife with Chinese Nationalists, who sought to claim the island as Chinese--before her father is, as the delicious jacket copy tells us, dragged away from his family and thrown into jail for speaking out against the Nationalists.
The book's merits defy both easy identification and description due to how many different skins the narrative wears: the bildungsroman, the romance, the immigrant tale, the espionage thriller, and the medical horror story. Such shifts, even over the course of 400 pages, may disorient some readers. But given how the novel follows its narrator from birth to seniority, these challenges to the story's own status quo are necessary for the convincing depiction of a decades-long life. (And this depiction, with so many carefully--I'd even say lovingly--selected and refined details, is triumphantly successful at convincing us. Parts of the novel are so crisply described and infused with so much truthful emotion that they read not like fiction, but memoir.)
What further unifies the many changes in setting and tone are the conflicts that undergird them--particularly, how the narrator's families (both the one she is born into and the one she tries to create) remain forcibly pinned against the formidable political turmoil of any given moment. This is a novel in which the trappings of politics are embodied by the trappings of paranoia, of marriage, and of guilt.
There are still more reasons to recommend the book--the poetry of the prose, the almost mythic voice commanded by the narrator--but I'll stop describing them here; this is a book better read than read about.