She nodded. She felt a little warmer.
They continued to walk, looking at the hunched-over figures of the women in the rice paddies harvesting the heavy grain with sickles.
“It’s difficult to know how the future will turn out,” Dad continued. “Things have a way of working themselves out to the surprise of everyone. Sometimes the most ugly things can turn out to be the cause for something wonderful. I know you haven’t had a good time here, Lilly, and it’s unfortunate. But this is a beautiful island. Formosa means ‘most beautiful’ in Latin.”
Like America, Meikuo, the Beautiful Country, Lilly thought. The wildflowers will bloom again when it is spring.
In the distance, they could see the children from the village playing a game of baseball.
“Someday you’ll see that our sacrifices here were worth it. This place will be free, and you’ll see its beauty and remember your time here fondly. Anything is possible. Maybe one day we’ll even see a boy from here playing baseball in America. Now wouldn’t that be something, Lilly, a Chinese boy from Formosa playing at Yankee Stadium?”
Lilly focused on the scene in her head.
Teddy steps up to the plate in a Red Sox helmet, his calm eyes staring at the pitcher on the mound, the N crossed with a Y on his cap. He swings at the first pitch, and there is a crisp, loud thwack. It’s a hit. The ball floats high into the cold October air, into the dark sky and the bright lights, an arc that will end somewhere in the grandstands beyond right field. The crowd stands. Teddy begins to trot along the baselines, his face breaking into a wide grin, searching the crowd for Mr. Kan and Lilly. And the wild cheers shake the stadium as the pennant is clinched. The Red Sox are going to the ?World Series.
“I’ve been thinking,” Dad continued. “Maybe we should take a vacation before we go back to Clearwell. I was thinking that we can stop by New York to visit Grandma. The Yankees are playing the Reds in the World Series. I’ll try to get tickets, and we can go see them and cheer them on.”
Lilly shook her head and looked up at him. “I don’t like the Yankees anymore.”
? ? ?
AUTHOR’S NOTES: For a variety of reasons, this text does not use pinyin to romanize Chinese. Instead, Mandarin phrases and words are generally romanized using the Wade-Giles system, and ?Taiwanese Minnan (Fukienese) phrases and words are romanized using either the Ph-ōe-jī system or English phonetic spelling.
An introductory account of the history of joint American-ROC covert operations against the PRC during the Cold War may be found in John W. Garver’s The Sino-American Alliance: Nationalist China and American Cold ?War Strategy in Asia.
The art of literomancy is greatly simplified in this story. As well, the folk etymologies and decompositions used here are understood to have little relationship with academic conclusions.
SIMULACRUM
[A] photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
—SUSAN SONTAG
PAUL LARIMORE:
You are already recording? I should start? Okay.
Anna was an accident. Both Erin and I were traveling a lot for work, and we didn’t want to be tied down. But you can’t plan for everything, and we were genuinely happy when we found out. We’ll make it work somehow, we said. And we did.
When Anna was a baby, she wasn’t a very good sleeper. She had to be carried and rocked as she gradually drifted to sleep, fighting against it the whole time. You couldn’t be still. Erin had a bad back for months after the birth, and so it was me who walked around at night with the little girl’s head against my shoulder after feedings. Although I know I must have been very tired and impatient, all I remember now is how close I felt to her as we moved back and forth for hours across the living room, lit only by moonlight, while I sang to her.
I wanted to feel that close to her, always.
I have no simulacra of her from back then. The prototype machines were very bulky, and the subject had to sit still for hours. That wasn’t going to happen with a baby.
This is the first simulacrum I do have of her. She’s about seven.
—Hello, sweetheart.
—Dad!
—Don’t be shy. These men are here to make a documentary movie about us. You don’t have to talk to them. Just pretend they’re not here.
—Can we go to the beach?
—You know we can’t. We can’t leave the house. Besides, it’s too cold outside.
—Will you play dolls with me?
—Yes, of course. We’ll play dolls as long as you want.
ANNA LARIMORE:
My father is a hard person for the world to dislike. He has made a great deal of money in a way that seems like an American fairy tale: Lone inventor comes up with an idea that brings joy to the world, and the world rewards him deservedly. On top of it all, he donates generously to worthy causes. The Larimore Foundation has cultivated my father’s name and image as carefully as the studios airbrush the celebrity sex simulacra that they sell.
But I know the real Paul Larimore.
One day, when I was thirteen, I had to be sent home because of an upset stomach. I came in the front door, and I heard noises from my parents’ bedroom upstairs. They weren’t supposed to be home. No one was.
A burglar? I thought. In the fearless and stupid way of teenagers, I went up the stairs, and I opened the door.
My father was naked in bed, and there were four naked women with him. He didn’t hear me, and so they continued what they were doing, there in the bed that my mother shared with him.
After a while, he turned around, and we looked into each other’s eyes. He stopped, sat up, and reached out to turn off the projector on the nightstand. The women disappeared.
I threw up.
When my mother came home later that night, she explained to me that it had been going on for years. My father had a weakness for a certain kind of woman, she said. Throughout their marriage, he had trouble being faithful. She had suspected this was the case, but my father was very intelligent and careful, and she had no evidence.
When she finally caught him in the act, she was furious, and wanted to leave him. But he begged and pleaded. He said that there was something in his makeup that made real monogamy impossible for him. But, he said, he had a solution.
He had taken many simulacra of his conquests over the years, more and more lifelike as he improved the technology. If my mother would let him keep them and tolerate his use of them in private, he would try very hard to not stray again.
So this was the bargain that my mother made. He was a good father, she thought. She knew that he loved me. She did not want to make me an additional casualty of a broken promise that was only made to her.
And my father’s proposal did seem like a reasonable solution. In her mind, his time with the simulacra was no different from the way other men used pornography. No touching was involved. They were not real. No marriage could survive if it did not contain some room for harmless fantasies.
But my mother did not look into my father’s eyes the way I did when I walked in on him. It was more than a fantasy. It was a continuing betrayal that could not be forgiven.
PAUL LARIMORE:
The key to the simulacrum camera is not the physical imaging process, which, while not trivial, is ultimately not much more than the culmination of incremental improvements on technologies known since the days of the daguerreotype.