True Port
It wasn’t until the seventh day after Father Li’s passing that anyone thought to open the old leather suitcase he had carried across the ocean.
Inside there was no money, no gold, nothing of value. Only three things: a notebook with curled corners, densely filled with wobbly phonetic symbols; a stack of IOUs yellowed from age; and a boat ticket.
The ticket was from 1958, Genoa to Keelung. One way.
The wake was held in the little clinic beside the market. People paying respects lined up from the street corner all the way to the docks. Some clutched money he had advanced for medicine thirty years ago; some carried bundles of greens from their own gardens. No one could pronounce his Italian name. They only knew him as Li, a man who had spoken Taiwanese for most of his life.
- At sea.
A twenty-four-year-old stood on deck, the sea splitting the sky open with a pale gray light. He hugged the suitcase to his chest. In his pocket was a phrase of Chinese he had practiced for months, just four words, turning them over and over. His shipmates had laughed at him plenty of times:
“I—come, help.”
He didn’t know yet that this stumbling little phrase would be answered, gently, over sixty-seven years, by a land he had never seen.
He learned Taiwanese at the market.
The first time he opened his mouth, he said “selling fish” as “selling leftovers,” and the whole street collapsed in laughter. Amid the fishy smell of melting ice, he laughed too, then took out his notebook and made a note, the phonetic symbols crawling like hunched ants across the page.
His fiercest teacher was Chun-chi, the old vegetable seller. “Not like that!” she’d scold, tapping his notebook, slowing down word by word, as if teaching her own precious grandchild. Sometimes the lessons stretched until the sun slanted west, and she’d simply stuff a bunch of scallions into his hands: “Go cook these. Learning a language takes it out of you.”
How good did his Taiwanese become? A new postman haggled with him over a price, argued back and forth for ages, then looked up and met a pair of blue eyes. He froze. “Grandpa, how come your Taiwanese is smoother than my great-grandfather’s?”
He smiled. “Because I’m a true-blooded Taiwanese.”
No one took it literally. No one doubted it either.
The light in the clinic often burned past midnight.
One rainy winter night, a woman burst in carrying her fevered child, soaked through. She counted the bills in her hand three times. Not enough. Her hands shook, worse than the child’s cough. She would tell people, ever after, that that night she had already closed her heart, already begun to sink to her knees—
Father Li pushed the bills back.
He gave the injection, mixed the medicine, then slipped another slip of paper into his drawer. Years later, people learned that drawer held hundreds of such slips—not one of them a demand for payment, all of them records: a date, a name, the amount he had advanced, and at the end, a short curved line, like a smile.
When people repaid him, he accepted with a smile. When they didn’t, he still smiled.
Ask him why. He thought a long time, then answered in his halting Taiwanese: “When I was young, someone treated me the same way.”
Ask who, and he would say nothing more, only gaze out at the rain.
That night, as the woman carried her child out the door, she looked back. The clinic light glowed in the rain like a star that refused to sleep. She thought: this man, ten thousand miles from home, has come to love our children.
Some said: burn those IOUs in his drawer. He’s gone—what’s the point of keeping them?
He could still hear, then. He waved his hand. “Keep them. It’s not the money I’m waiting for. I’m waiting to hear ‘I’m doing well these days.’”
At New Year’s, his doorstep filled with footprints faster than anyone’s.
A bowl of soup from one house, a basket of red tortoise cakes from another, until his little table was laden. One granny forced a red envelope on him; he refused, and she glared: “When you paid for medicine, did you refuse?”
So he accepted—and turned around and gave it to the child down the alley who couldn’t afford school. Kindness in his hands was like water; it never stayed overnight.
Every year someone asked: Father, when are you going back to Italy?
And someone would ask: Do you miss home?
He thought about it. “Yes,” he said. Then, after a pause: “But not when a child is burning with fever. Not when vegetable prices crash. And least of all when you’re hurting.”
Later on, even the questioners grew fewer. He had an answer ready in Taiwanese all his own:
“My home is here. I’m a true-blooded Taiwanese.”
By then he was old, his blue eyes clouded with mist, but his Taiwanese grew younger with every year. The sea was the same shade of blue on both ends. In his later years he often sat on the breakwater watching ships, saying the sea had stitched his two homelands together, and the stitches were all those boats coming and going.
On the day of his funeral, half the market closed down.
Chun-chi’s granddaughter came to burn incense, carrying her own grandchild. The fevered baby from that rainy night came too—now wearing a white coat, working at the town health station. He said he kept a few slips of paper in his own drawer—amounts he had advanced. He didn’t collect on those either.
One stack of IOUs. Two generations of drawers.
The suitcase now sits on a small cabinet in the clinic, unlocked, open to anyone who wants to look.
A child stared for a long time at the yellowed boat ticket, then looked up and asked: why didn’t he take a ship back?
The grown-up opened his mouth, and couldn’t answer.
Outside the window, the market’s clamor rolled in in waves—someone calling fish prices in Taiwanese, the voice bright as the sea at noon. Out on the water, ships were entering the harbor, carrying those who had come from far away, and those coming home.
A ticket with no return journey lay quietly on top of the notebook. And beside the cabinet, some child or other was practicing a phrase in a milky little voice:
“I—come, help.”
(The End)
This story is adapted from true events. All names are pseudonyms.
COVER_QUERY: old open suitcase with vintage boat ticket and notebook
Based on a true story