Green Island, Shawna Yang Ryan's follow-up to her debut novel, Water Ghosts, explores many themes familiar to readers of immigrant literature--cultural collision, alienation, loneliness--while grounding these themes in a story about trauma inflicted on a national scale. Ryan, who spent time as a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan, has centered her narrative on Taiwan's seemingly endless history of occupation, colonization and repression.
Finally freed from Japanese occupation by the end of World War II, Taiwan soon found itself again flooded with foreigners, this time by supporters of Chiang Kai-shek's recently defeated Kuomintang (or KMT). Green Island opens with the protagonist's birth, which coincides with an anti-KMT uprising and a government crackdown that began a long, infamous phase of Taiwanese history known as the White Terror. The protagonist's father, or Baba, is soon swept up in a wave of government kidnappings and we follow him as he survives, mostly by luck, years of brutal treatment. When Baba finally returns to his family, our protagonist notes: "In all ways, he was a stranger."
The protagonist, who remains unnamed, grows up in a Taiwan crippled by the moral and spiritual ramifications of totalitarian rule. She marries not out of love, but out of a desire for a better life in the U.S. Even still, she can't escape the long reach of the KMT's secret police, and her struggle to acclimate to a new country is vastly complicated by the persistent threat of violence against her and her family members in Taiwan. Green Island is historical fiction at its epic, heartrending best. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books