Literary Criticism: Green Island

Green Island: Connection in a Sea of Separation 

Green Island explores the history of Taiwan and its narrators, fraught with violence, secrets, and untold truths. In a country birthed from the ashes of Eastern politics, the novel regales its reader with a tale of renaissance. Taiwan, formerly known as Formosa, is contextualized as the new state of Nationalist rebels; families like Dr. Tsai’s growing bloodline are caught in the crossfire. Shawna Yang Ryan’s shifting perspectives push the boundaries of truth and storytelling within the family. When “all the stories they will tell will be tales of their own invention,” the author forces her audience to trek through the subjective mystery of truth, compelling readers to place their trust in the narrator. The novel delves into the definition of family, ideas of prevailing Eastern collectivism, and the limits of time and age to piecemeal together lives taken hostage by Taiwanese unrest. By submerging readers in a vat of traditional hierarchies, negligent intimacy, and the value of memories that expire with age, Green Island manipulates perspective to conjure social loss at the hands of state violence: pains that are often yearning for the unknown “before.” 

Throughout the novel, Ryan’s narrative consistently portrays the strain between father and daughter—Dr. Tsai and the narrator—to showcase the implications of time and state violence on relationships. Dr. Tsai, taken prisoner for speaking against the Nationalist party, returns to his family’s life and enters his youngest daughter’s consciousness as a broken man, “a stranger in clothes that belonged to a different city, perhaps even a different time” (Ryan 81). In the narrator’s young first-person perception, she sees her “mother [touch] his—my father’s—sleeve” (Ryan 84). A man, to whom half of her DNA belongs, is relegated to “his.” Her word choice embodies a feeling of disjointedness. She corrects herself in her reference, a clear indication to readers that she must learn who her father is, much like the audience must come to terms with Dr. Tsai as the tortured Baba. Thus, Ryan reflects how state violence and corruption take hold of an individual's life, leaving their families reeling from the after effects. Although he helps birth his daughter and lives on in the spoken respect of his elder children, Baba is only a pronoun to his youngest daughter. Taiwan’s arrests in the name of eliminating all communism force families to pretend as though they are unified lest they run the risk of persecution for insubordination; they cannot shake the boat. Therefore, Ryan’s writing exemplifies the defining tenets of Asian family life. Through collectivism, conformity, and silence, the narrator is meant to default to shared genetics, connecting with her father with only DNA to tie them together. There is no room for her to stray from the fantasy of unity; she corrects herself when mere thought betrays the image of a cohesive home. The narrator’s family cannot accept a reality where Baba is no longer the man they once knew nor one that she had never met. They must save face and avoid further punishment from a government that accepts nothing less than full compliance and zero reasons to doubt a family’s allegiance. Political surveillance ensures that deference is required from a young age. Green Island is the story of a daughter connecting with an idea of a father from an unwitnessed “before” and a family’s efforts to bridge the cavernous gap of lost time. Thus, her relationship with her father, posed in her young but already self-critical perspective, exposes how state violence and traditional values reign over trauma. 

The narrator’s bond with her family speaks to the limited closeness of a silenced home under surveillance—where knowledge and connection are all the more restricted when perception is constrained by subjective truth. Nearing the end of her youth in Taiwan, the narrator’s introduction to Wei catapults her into espionage within the borders of her family’s knowledge. Yet, Ryan’s writing and organization choices place readers in an anomalous position of knowledge. Green Island opens with a third-person contextualization of the family’s place in Nationalist violence: a father torn away from his family for speaking out and tortured in prison. However, through time skips and Wei’s forceful introduction of the narrator to her father’s past, the speaker’s journey for clarity places her in the scope of Ah Zhay’s truths; “it was like that… Don’t tell anyone” (Ryan 133). While the narrator must learn Baba’s story from her sister’s retellings, readers visit a timeline they already know; they have already witnessed Baba’s fate. The audience can predict, in greater detail than what is spoken, the stories that Ah Zhay will tell. Thus, the opening pages of the novel give imagery-filled, expressive, and emotional insight into years of loss that Ah Zhay skims over. The narrator’s older sister reduces their father’s story to a hushed spurt of Taiwanese. She cannot risk the family’s safety under the government’s watchful eye, waiting to strike those who endanger the Nationalist image. Therefore, the audience is able to fill in gaps that the narrator has no knowledge of; her perception is screened through her sister’s compliance to Nationalist culture. With the dramatic gap between the reader’s consciousness and the narrator’s filtered view of her father, Ryan exposes the painful truth of a militarized state. Stories and history become only what is told. Violence is the benefactor of its own erasure. In a world where mouths are the only purveyors of an annihilated reality, the narrator’s disconnected knowledge of her father is fed to her as a regurgitation of painful memories. The author’s writing capitalizes on the constraints of time, violence, and human delivery to show how they limit the scope of truth. In Taiwan, where total devotion is rewarded with government ignorance, families are at the will and mercy of a higher power. The connection that weaves them together is tainted by the pain of time and fear of governmental consequences: a situation illustrated by the narrator’s incomplete perspective of her father’s tortured life. The pervasiveness of disconnect as a result of government intervention is portrayed in the narrator’s connection to her husband; even the safety of another continent and romantic bonds are not a salve strong enough to soothe the burns of state violence. Thus, the plot’s protagonist is caught in a never-ending stasis of lost autonomy. Within her younger perspective, readers witness how she is to listen to and respect her father. In adulthood, she is to listen to and respect her husband. When Nationalists endanger her family, the narrator’s devotion to her husband wars against her fear: “Look at us. We can’t win. Just Stop. It’s not worth it. Wei wouldn’t listen. I knew it” (Ryan 247). Ryan’s development of the main character embodies ideas of formative, choking subordination in Asian families—obedience to the father and submission to the husband. The narrator is trapped in a hierarchical system of power within the family while simultaneously ensnared in the imposing control of the Taiwanese nation-state. Both sources of patriarchy that rule over her life are delicately intertwined with Nationalist contempt: her father, a political prisoner, and her husband, a critic and protestor. Although the threat of state violence strains both relationships, the traditionalism instilled in the narrator trains compliance in any household headed by a man; her protests remain in her thoughts. Therefore, the author comments on the traditional dynamic that oversees Asian/Asian American families. Through the narrator’s internalized trysts with Wei, Ryan exemplifies that socialized devotion and duty cannot be the only building blocks of a relationship, especially when the connection is tainted by political retribution. 

The intimate disconnect of the couple ultimately enables the narrator to fall into infatuation with Jia Bao, a human manifestation of her husband’s lack of counsel to her concerns and the target of regrettable desires framed in the omniscient structure of the novel. Jia Bao’s recognition of the narrator’s identity—“You could do this on your own. You don’t need me”—fulfills the main character’s yearning to be seen and heard (Ryan 233). Through the narrator’s perspective, readers are able to recognize Jia Bao’s effect upon her: “An urge to smell his finger struck me. I felt like crying” (Ryan 206). In a marriage where Wei ignores her voice for the glory of his martyrdom, the narrator’s relationship with Jia Bao substantiates the pulling restraints of state violence. Temptations, seeping into the speaker’s thoughts, center around Jia Bao. The thirst for her husband’s collaborator strikes conflict in her thoughts. She is cognizant of her desirous missteps and preemptively mourns for her mistake, “crying” for her internal betrayal (Ryan 206). Thus, Ryan’s writing illustrates the emotionally tempting idea of adultery: an outlet for otherwise trapped expression and frustration. The author explores the emotional needs and unmet wants of Asian womanhood, capitalizing on the added duress of government intervention to hypothesize coping through infidelity. In a home where she is seen as second-class and placed in a financially dependent, traditional position, the narrator’s path to stepping out on her husband stems from cultural and emotional distance that is escalated by Wei’s work against the Taiwanese Nationalists. Jia Bao recognizes her womanhood and her mind. He is the outlet of her independence and a future she craves—he is a world where she is free to write her voice; he is a world where she can reject her husband’s decisions and choose safety over his glory. Jia Bao is less of an illicit partner but, rather, the embodiment of a chance at living another life where she can escape political martyrdom and strained affection for untainted, unburdened love. He is the fantasy of connection where emotions and affection can overcome the ever-present threat of Nationalist punishment: a bittersweet idealization that blooms in the narrator’s first-person confessions of desire.

Delving into another aspect of the plot, a look at Ryan’s shift in perspective to Baba, or Dr. Tsai, explores how memories are lost to time and age—locked for personal safe-keeping by the jaded hands of violence. As mentioned previously, Baba fits into the narrative as an authoritarian father, commanding his place in the family after his return and tortured by the trauma of his time in prison. However, Green Island’s end marks a shift in readers’ insight into a character that had only filled the plot with tangible experiences of direct, state-issued pain and tortured parenting. Rather, the Dr. Tsai of the past, long before his days as Baba, is a man whose eyes are consistently “drawn to [his wife’s] creamy throat and the darkness of her hair against her skin” when it was just “he and his wife” (Ryan 369-370). With the vulnerability found in the patriarch’s warm memories of his now-aged wife, the author’s choice of perspective allows Baba to transcend his established character. His voice gives readers a glimpse at the man before he is marred by the tides of torture and time. Dr. Tsai comes to readers in his youth: the person his children never had the chance to meet. Ryan’s structuring of the novel, with Baba’s warmth peeking through at the conclusion of Green Island, suggests how the rose-tinted glasses of one’s youth are stolen by age and smashed by the hammer of government violence. The narrator’s idea of her father, already limited by a shared culture of secrecy and only spoken by her sister’s admission, is further defined by her father’s willingness, or lack thereof, to speak of his past. Her perception and knowledge of her father are at the subjective will of his openness. These are the stories that will die with him and his wife. In the end, Ryan’s writing exemplifies that a person will only be known through the living’s memories. 

Through the shifting relationships the narrator endures and the bittersweet reminiscence of a person never known, Green Island uncovers how time and torture have the power to pull people apart. From before her childhood to the self-satisfied end she finds in Jia Bao’s words, the narrator consistently displays the limitations of a person’s view. Humans are ruled by the scope of their knowledge and the inescapable rhythm of time. Ryan’s writing adds another element to this dynamic, entrapping her characters in the overarching web of Nationalist violence. Within 

this space, government consequences penalize the already difficult act of connection; if the family tries to bond in a manner deemed inappropriate by political surveillance, they must pay. There is no space to make mistakes or risk passing these boundaries. Silence and compliance are essential. Thus, in a fictional world all too real for the Taiwanese in a post-228 Incident world, Shawna Yang Ryan leaves readers with the idea that the survivors, the winners, and the writers tell history. Those who internalize their truths and hide their paths are lost to time, silenced by an unstoppable progression of age, and only remembered by how they acted toward those who live on to tell their stories.

Works Cited 

Ryan, Shawna Yang. Green Island. Vintage, 2017.