He has a memory of jumping down concrete bleachers, monolithic and grey, like a staircase built for giants. Each drop sends a jolt through his knees; each step is nearly waist-high. There are snacks, too. Salty and crunchy, or sweet and sticky, the manufactured flavor is engineered not just to please, but to wire itself so deeply into a child’s brain that years later, the cravings trigger a sense of nostalgia that feels like truth.
He’s certain that the memory takes place at a baseball game, perhaps it is even the first one he ever attended. But he doesn’t remember any other details to support his speculation, nor does anyone else who might have bore witness to the memory. The adults who raised him were then too dazed by the fog of parenthood and working class life to recall much of anything today, least of all the logistics of a vague memory from many years ago.
However, current circumstances strongly suggest that his parents would have never had the mind to take their son to a baseball game.
One typically imagines assimilation as something that happens after a voyage: the arrival in a new place elicits acclimating to its language, food, and culture, until eventually the migrant resembles the new world more than the old. But for his parents, assimilation was experienced inside-out, before they ever even left Taiwan.
When the Chinese Nationalist government—or KMT, the name they always speak in haste—took control of Taiwan in 1945, they sought to build a different country by erasing the one that already existed. And so his parents learned in their classrooms to speak someone else’s language, read someone else’s history, and leave behind their own. Cultures were rewritten, and collective memory was resigned to Mandela Effect: although many remembered who they were, evidence would now suggest otherwise. Inside homes, there were still traces. Rituals and records to suggest different truths. But the moment the Taiwanese stepped outside, those truths became falsities. The KMT’s message was clear: forget who you are. Do not carry the names of your ancestors. And if you remember too loudly, you might not live to pass it on, for dissent is punishable by death.
This is the reason they left. He knows it, not from stories passed down, but from their absence. What’s unsaid tells a bigger story over time.
But what he finds strange and sometimes a bit callous is the symmetry between their history and his. He understands that the political contexts are different—one scenario coercive and violent, and the other, arguably, a choice. But the parallels are still there: once he began school in the U.S., the language he grew up with stopped being useful. At home, they call him A-ûi, a name that rolls off their tongues with ease, connects seamlessly with the care-worn utterances of their household. A-ûi chia̍ h-pn̄g. Outside, he becomes Wayne. Clipped and clean, a single syllable that fits into forms and roll calls. And he, too, is told to identify himself as Chinese—something that he’s so often informed of with such certainty that he resigns himself to accepting it as truth.
Wayne wrestles with the gaps in his identity. The places where his parents missed the cues to instill in him the rites of passage that those around him seem to understand instinctively.
The baseball games and Little League, for one. These are the threads that stitch a childhood into place, that make one American legible to others. But after eighteen years of living in the town of Ashfield, Wayne’s parents continue their willful ignorance of long standing local traditions like baseball. Their stubborn disinterest in the unfamiliar drives Wayne to dismiss the idea that they once mustered the courage to cross an ocean and a hemisphere to settle in a strange new place. He finds himself alone in trying to retroactively assemble the version of childhood that should be part of his story. To belong, he has to remember things he has never lived.
Today, a relic from his childhood resurfaces, stirring the possibility of a memory. Amidst his summer cleanout, sorting through old toys and belongings once cherished but seasonally replaced—casualties of a consumer culture far removed from his parents’ era where a rubber band and a bottle cap could suffice for years—Wayne uncovers a small plastic flag. Light enough for a child to wave, it bears an emblem of five conjoined semi circles forming Taiwan’s national symbol, the plum blossom, accompanied by the words “Chinese Taipei Baseball Association.”
He reckons his Uncle Jerry is the source for the memory.
Uncle Jerry—Wayne’s father’s eldest brother—was the first to arrive in the U.S. in 1967, when the Hart-Cellar Act opened the path for him to immigrate. Unlike Wayne’s parents, Uncle Jerry embraced his new world. The old black and white photos from Taiwan depict a stern young man with a meticulously maintained military crew cut. Perhaps it simply wasn’t customary to smile for photos in older days, but Uncle Jerry’s stare is distant, hollow. He abandoned his old self the moment he arrived on U.S. soil, quickly connecting with the people, culture, music, language, and food.
For example, mornings at Wayne’s house were once filled with the warm and inviting vapor and aroma from steaming buns and congee until Uncle Jerry disrupted that routine. It was not long after Wayne entered elementary school that Uncle Jerry brought over a grocery bag full of colorful boxes. Quickly, the old breakfasts disappeared. Now replaced with sugar cereals and Pop-Tarts, home cooking became no match for the rush of shelf-stable American convenience food and its hyperactive branding.
“Believe it or not, I ate this when I was a kid in Taiwan,” Uncle Jerry loves to tell the story. “Worked many late nights at the sugar factory, only to use half my earnings to buy another kind of sugar from the American GI’s.” He laughs.
Dinner still maintains its traditional presence, eaten off Tatung dishware under the fluorescent glow of energy-saving light bulbs. Wayne’s family watches Taiwanese programs pulled through satellite from a combination TV/VCR placed next to the dinner table. Uncle Jerry, twice divorced, joins them on most nights. Tonight, Wayne’s mother serves a stew of pork hocks. Slow-cooked, reheated, and served again for days, the permeating smell of garlic, anise, and gelatinous fat fills the house with a thickness of air that will linger all week. Eyes glued to the screen, the adults gnaw off every bit of meat, discarding pieces of bone and ligament in little piles right on the table.
Wayne’s father interjects here and there with terse comments. On this particular night, they watch the news, and the anchors announce the finalists for this year’s Little League World Series. Taiwan has made it once again. Except in the international sporting world—as well as on the toy flag that Wayne has just uncovered—they call it Chinese Taipei. Wayne’s father turns to the others with a look of entertainment, waving his chopsticks at the TV. “Propaganda,” he states, as his eyes go back to his pork hock. He hunches his neck toward his bowl to sink his teeth into the dense meat, tearing it off the bone with a swift turn of the neck.
Wayne wants a memory of Little League. He pictures hot dogs sweating on metal rollers, their salty, savory smell wafting from a wooden concession shed, and discarded peanut shells crunching under his shoes, while he cheers on home runs that soar over the lush green kudzu wrapping the chain link fence along the outfield line. He cherishes any morsel of shared history that he can bring to life in his imagination, because every American custom has been a learning experience, and living them is mastery of the course.
It’s not lost on Wayne that Chinese Taipei seems to have a presence at the Little League World Series almost every year. The lanky boys, tan-skinned and stone-faced, play with intensity, as if they’re carrying more than just the weight of a game. Is baseball a part of Taiwanese identity, too? And if so, then why is it unknown to him? Wayne has spent years trying to belong to the rhythms of American life, wearing his shoes indoors and his emotions outdoors. Maybe Taiwan isn’t just a distant backdrop for stories his parents never tell. Maybe it’s a bridge to the story that Wayne wants for himself.
Wayne abandons his half-eaten rice bowl to retrieve the toy flag from his room. “I found this,” he announces, waving the flag.
Uncle Jerry’s face wrinkles.
“A-peh,” Wayne addresses his uncle, “Did you give this to me?”
“No way,” Uncle Jerry responds too quickly. “Chinese Taipei? That’s KMT talk…I don’t have anything to do with that!”
“Put that away,” his mother says, “and finish your dinner first.”
“Pài thok,” Wayne snaps, impatient like the curt men on the Taiwanese soap operas his parents watch through the static of the satellite.
Wayne knows that the phrase Chinese Taipei triggers bullheaded avoidance. But he doesn’t know just how vivid the memories are that drive this denial, for the vision that has just flashed in his father’s memory is rich with detail. Wayne’s father recalls watching the 1971 broadcast of the Little League World Series from a neighbor’s courtyard, the open-air space that serves as the heart of the traditional Taiwanese home—fit for all family affairs, from gatherings to daily tasks like food preparation and hanging up laundry; nothing like the family rooms of American homes, sealed off, carpeted, decorated with objects not meant to be touched.
Because TVs were a luxury at the time, and few families owned them, those who had them placed them outside or near a window so neighbors and passersby could watch, turning every flick of the dial into an invitation. That night, six or seven teenage boys from the neighborhood gathered in that courtyard, embracing the coolness of the AM hours of the night, the lateness a prerequisite for catching the afternoon broadcast on the other side of the world. Panning the field while commentators discussed the day’s weather forecast, the cameraman momentarily captured a jet in the sky. The jet was pulling a banner with words that shook everyone in the courtyard, though they wouldn’t say it. It read “Long Live Taiwan Independence!”, a declaration never seen so plainly before, for even the thought itself was dangerous in their country.
A gesture this grand, this impossible, was unforgettable. It drove fear in those who caught sight of it, an apprehension that even the image now etched into their shared memory might be detected by the KMT. But beneath that fear was a moment of unspoken enlightenment, each of the boys validated in their premature feelings of subversion as something more significant than childish tendencies toward disobedience. This act would surely sabotage the KMT’s plans of leveraging Taiwan’s dominance in the Little League World Series to garner international support. Players, largely Taiwanese from poor rural areas, were marketed as success symbols for the KMT’s brand of state-controlled nationalism. Savages turned superstars.
After dinner, Uncle Jerry approaches Wayne with an offer.
“If you’re interested in baseball,” Uncle Jerry says, “I’ll take you to see the Rebels.”
The Rebels are the local minor league team, a source of hometown pride in Ashfield, yet Wayne has never attended a game before. This will be his first, unless his fragment of a memory eventually surfaces and claims otherwise.
The next evening, they pull into the gravel lot behind the Municipal Stadium, the sky orange with the late summer sunset. As they find their seats in the metal bleachers, still scalding from the day’s heat, the lights dim just slightly, and a hush begins to fall over the crowd. Near home plate, a choir of teenagers about Wayne’s age begins to assemble.
“All rise for the National Anthem, sung by the Ashfield Baptist Church Youth Choir,” the announcer’s voice crackles over the loudspeakers.
Uncle Jerry stands slowly, not out of reverence but muscle memory, an old reflex awakened. He once saluted the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek with the same rigid posture, years ago, in another uniform, in another country, where grief and silence were interchangeable.
Wayne watches from the corner of his eye as his uncle’s normally animated expressions vanish into stillness. Uncle Jerry’s body turns stiff, ceremonial, and his lips draw tight, as if holding back words.
For most of the game, Uncle Jerry stays quiet. Wayne wonders if it’s boredom. Or maybe frustration. His uncle, usually a continuous stream of stories and commentary, now sits in silence, though his eyes never leave the field.
In the bottom of the seventh inning, the Rebels lose their lead when a hitter from the visiting team, the Wildcats, cracks a clean line drive down the first base line, sending the Rebels’ first baseman on a chase. But the hitter is fast, sprinting across the base long before the first baseman can return. A runner scores.
“Cover the base!” Uncle Jerry snaps, springing upright. He shouts toward the pitcher’s mound. “C’mon!”
Wayne glances over, eyebrows raised.
“This pitcher’s useless,” Uncle Jerry mutters in Hokkien, still standing. “And throws like Su Xinhua.”
“Who?” Wayne asks. Uncle Jerry is watching too intensely to notice.
By the ninth inning, the score is tied, and there are two outs. It is down to the Rebels’ star hitter, Bud Shipley, to salvage a favorable outcome. His bat cocked high above his shoulder, he fails to swing at the first and second pitches, both perfect fastballs down the center. The crowd groans, beginning to accept defeat. But Bud stays patient against the third pitch, a ball that drifts just outside. On the fourth pitch, he makes contact.
For a second, there is only awe. A few scattered but audible gasps. Bud sends the ball high into a clean arc. As it disappears somewhere in the distant and now dark horizon, the silence explodes.
Wayne jumps to his feet along with the rest of the stadium, thrilled that his first game has ended in a news-worthy win. He claps wildly, swept up by the chaos of roaring voices. Children behind them blow on plastic horns and scream repeatedly, like sirens. The men to their left spill beer down their shirts as they holler and slap each across the back.
“Did you see that? Did you see that?” echoes all around them, shrieks of disbelief and jubilation.
But beside him, Uncle Jerry doesn’t move.
An organ rendition of “God Bless America,” blares over the speakers in competition with the clamor of the crowd. Then, the sound of booming fireworks takes dominance, erupting in cascades of red, white, and blue, further stretching the impulse to devolve into unrest.
Uncle Jerry, a man normally drawn to all forms of celebration, stays glued to his seat. He begins to shake his head slowly, as if in disapproval of the great victory. The blinding cheer.
“There was a game…,” he says, “we were down, bottom of the ninth. I hit a homerun too.” His voice lowers.
“I forgot about the soldiers. The killing. I couldn’t hear it…” His eyes glaze over, the muffled crowd still cheering, howling, shouting behind them.
“Uncle Jerry?” Wayne asks. “What are you talking about?”
The next morning, Wayne finds his father hunched over the kitchen table, peeling an apple with a small paring knife, maintaining a meditative pace that keeps his hands busy and his thoughts quiet. Wayne watches as his father separates the shiny apple peel in a long single spiral.
“Pā,” he says, “Did Uncle Jerry used to play baseball?”
“He played professionally,” his father answers without looking up, his tone flat, as if deploying the most mundane of information.
“In Taiwan. For the sugar factory,” he adds. “They sponsored a team.”
“So what happened?” Wayne asks.
“The league was run by the KMT. They thought sports would distract us,” Wayne’s father says. “Perhaps it worked.” He slowly cuts the apple into thick slices and drops each piece into a ceramic dish.
“Anyway, Jerry had to stop playing to do his military service. I was very young at the time. I don’t remember much.”
And just like that, Wayne’s father grabs another apple from the fruit bowl, expecting no further questions.
When Uncle Jerry arrives for dinner that night, Wayne is waiting in the driveway. The evening air is misty after a late afternoon rain.
“You said something last night,” Wayne says. “About a game you played.”
Uncle Jerry doesn’t answer right away. The car door creaks behind him. He shuffles around the driveway, examining the patches of crabgrass spilling out of the cracks in the concrete.
“Yes,” he says at last. “I loved the game.”
They walk side by side toward the house. Uncle Jerry’s voice is monotone, devoid of its usual animation, the performance of inflection a distraction from the memory he’s about to resurface. It’s not a story for laughter, not one he is telling to entertain.
“If we played the game, we could speak our language,” he continues. “Baseball was the exception to the rule. Because on the field, they didn’t have the words in their language. They had to let us use ours.”
Uncle Jerry pauses, stares at the callouses that never left his hands.
“There was a game, one up in Taipei. Ninth inning, we were down by two. I hit a homerun. Cleared the bases. Three of us came in.”
Wayne thinks back to Bud Shipley’s game-winning hit the night before, but in his mind, it’s not Bud rounding the bases. It’s his young Uncle Jerry from the old photographs, face solemn and focused, running without celebration. No arms raised, no beaming grin. Just a quiet, dutiful figure circling the diamond.
“I was used to speaking our language on the field. After the game, I went to greet my teacher. He came to watch me play. I used the wrong words. They slipped out. I was caught up in the moment. So was he.”
Uncle Jerry draws a deep breath and lets out a long sigh, eyes cast into the distance.
“Word got around that he had certain ideas. The KMT took him the next day. Pillaged his house, too. Left his wife and children with nothing.”
Now by the porch, moths and fireflies circle quietly above them. Wayne stares up at them.
“That flag you have, it’s from the 1971 Little League World Series,” Uncle Jerry says. “I used to go to Williamsport every year. Just to cheer for the kids. For Taiwan. The KMT sent their people, too. They handed out hundreds of those flags.”
“Chinese Taipei,” Uncle Jerry scoffs, his mouth twisting as if the words leave a bad taste. “But some Taiwanese here in the U.S. had a big idea. They paid a jet to fly a banner over the stadium. ‘Go Go Taiwan’, it said. To tell people that it’s Taiwan, not Chinese Taipei. There was a mention of independence, too, in Chinese characters, so everyone back home in Taiwan would see it on the broadcast. It flashed across so many televisions over there, a statement that could have cost you life imprisonment. But in the U.S., we had freedom of speech. Or so we thought.”
Wayne listens, his uncle’s voice still flat.
“The KMT was enraged,” he says. “The next year in Williamsport, they paid out every aerial banner company in the region. And they sent buses full of men. Men from their military, trained here in the U.S., just a couple states away. They came with baseball bats.”
He turns to Wayne, making eye contact.
“The baseball bats were for us,” he spells out. “They were sent to kill us. Here. In America.”
Wayne blinks, speechless. A car rolls down the street, its headlights casting a piercing light over Uncle Jerry’s face, now tired with age, creased with exhaustion from a distant memory that somehow still tenses his body.
“And the Americans?” Wayne finally asks. “Did they try to help?”
“No,” Uncle Jerry says. “The beating happened behind the grandstand. Those that caught glimpse of it didn’t know what to think. And there was a game to watch. So they turned away and thought nothing.”
Uncle Jerry’s real name was once Shigeru, but after 1945, he was told that the name he grew up answering to could no longer be uttered. Sometimes whispered, in a hushed voice, like a curse word, but never out loud again. Upon his arrival to the U.S., he saw the opportunity to shed himself of the culture that had been forced upon him. He found a name he could use again. Jerry. A childhood name, reclaimed and translated, now legal.
After dinner, full from the remainder of the pork hock stew, sauteed broccoli leaves, pickled radishes, and thin soup drawn from canned clams and fresh ginger, Uncle Jerry stretches and says he’s passing on fruit and tea. He’s tired. Wayne walks him outside, where Uncle Jerry pops the trunk of his Audi Cabriolet and pulls out a duffle bag. From it, he surfaces a baseball mitt and ball and hands it to Wayne.
“I never stopped loving the game,” Uncle Jerry says. “It seems you love it, too.” Then he takes off, tires whirring down the quiet street.
Wayne looks at the glove, decades old but in well-kept condition. The leather is soft, the chord that laces the fingers together still perfectly intact, the Wilson tag stitched across the base still pristine. A family heirloom that has existed all this time. Wayne thinks about his parents, who never thought to hint at this inheritance. Maybe they are still preoccupied with trying to remember who they are before someone else tells them what to be.
He slides the glove over his left hand, tosses the ball from his right hand, enjoys the snap of the leather as he practices clenching the glove tightly over the ball. He imagines the boys in Taiwan who used to cut sticks from bamboo to use as bats, fold up old newspapers into soft mitts, and save rubber bands, wrapping one over another to form something dense enough for tossing and swinging at. To play yagyu, as they called it, before the KMT renamed it to bàngqiú. Another new name to mask the untold stories.
There was a massacre when Shigeru was seven years old. It was scrubbed from history, every record wiped clean. Those that survived it had to remember in silence. Tens of thousands killed, yet there was no period of mourning. There were baseball games instead. The Provincial Games, a series established the year prior, took place as usual. A month later, the KMT inaugurated a new series, inviting a team from Shanghai to play against the Taiwanese, pushing their story that baseball was a Chinese Nationalist sport, one in which Taiwanese were merely players. Baseball set a stage for the KMT to perform their takeover with spectacle. On the radio, people listened to announcers sing the praises of perfect outfield throws to home plate, while outside, grenades pitched into crowds of townspeople remained unheard of. Slaughter in the streets could not be heard if the cheers from the stadiums were loud enough.
One time, losing their rubber band ball in the wetlands of the rice paddies, Shigeru and his friends continued their game of yagyu using stones instead—the heavy and smooth kind used to terrace rice fields. But rocks hurled across the field split palms, and blood seeped onto the sanitized headlines of their paper gloves. The only sign of bloodshed to ever touch the news.
Wayne thinks about baseball as just a game. A pure experience shared by those raised in the U.S.: Little League trophies, uniforms stained with dirt and grass, life skills shaped from teamwork instilled at an early age.
But now he sees it clearer. What he longs for isn’t something so simple, but a story carefully written. The boundless path of a ball batted into the fresh air of an open field is a myth buried deep beneath slogans and salutes created by institutions to distract. To assimilate. To train people to cheer, to look away, to stay quiet. That’s the part that now haunts him.
In that foggy memory that now remembers him back, Wayne is racing down those insurmountable bleachers. Chewing on a stick of maltose clenched between his molars. He holds a stone tightly in his fist. He’s staring down a statue behind home plate, a man carved into a seated pose of self-assured authority. The plaque doesn’t say his name, but everyone knows it. The statue reminds the crowd: Keep calm and play ball.
Wayne pulls back his arm, wondering if he can throw the stone hard enough to shatter the statue to pieces.
Grace Lin is a writer who lives in both Knoxville, TN and Detroit, MI. She works in the tech and nonprofit sectors, but in her free time, she enjoys writing sports commentaries, recipes, and foraging guides. Her work has been published by Taxonomy Press and Pearl Press. When not writing, she enjoys gardening, planning food popups, and cheering for the Mets.
Leave a Reply