“Green Island”

Shawna Yang Ryan

Knopf, $26.95

In “Green Island,” Shawna Yang Ryan’s second novel, the political turmoil in Taiwan is far from just the weather filling in the backdrop for a family saga. Matters of family and nation are so inextricably bound here that what results is as much a gripping narrative of an evolving Taiwan as an exquisitely crafted story of one family’s devotion and compromises.

The novel opens on Feb. 28, 1947, with the birth of the unnamed narrator, who remains anonymous throughout, and the violent uprising that initiated almost 40 years of martial law. Dr. Tsai, or Baba, the narrator’s father, is one of the many thousands who disappeared — imprisoned or killed for actual or perceived resistance to Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government — during Taiwan’s White Terror. The narrator and her family struggle to survive without Baba or any knowledge of what happened to him. Then they struggle to survive with the shattered man who returns 11 years later.

Released from the Green Island prison, Baba finds himself captive on another green island — where the events of Feb. 28 and the disappearances didn’t officially happen, where secret reports rule ordinary lives and where Kuomintang spies shadow him and demand his cooperation. The narrator eventually grows up to marry a university professor and moves to Berkeley, Calif., but that isn’t enough to loosen the grip of the Kuomintang. Her actions can still determine her family’s survival.

The narrator, like Baba, must find a way to bear her responsibility. A scene after one of Baba’s interrogations elegantly captures the tension that runs through the novel: “On the motorcycle ride back from the train station, I was overcome by the thought of his vulnerability. I tucked my hair into my collar so it would not whip him as I navigated the roads home. He balanced with his hands grasping the bar behind him, and with every turn, I felt the shifting burden of his weight and tried to balance it with my own.”

Remarkably compelling, the narrator reflects the vicissitudes of her arduous 56 years. She is the “filial, compliant” daughter who later can’t help but speak her mind. “But at the root, we’re all Chinese,” she says, yet later claims her identity as Taiwanese. She is the dutiful wife who keeps secrets from her husband. She is the “neutral observer” who must eventually take action. She even skirts the allegorical in her namelessness: A name can be a political trick, hollow euphemism or reclamation of experience and sovereignty. If something doesn’t have a name, the narrator and her husband wonder, how can we talk about it? Does it really exist?

Ultimately, everyone is more complicated than the name they are given or the role they play — hero, martyr, traitor, father, daughter or dictator. Even Chiang Kai-shek, the narrator explains, is still a man: “The word dictator turns him into a stone, a statue in a traffic roundabout.” The narrator laments that there are “no memorials for the men more complicated than martyrs — or for the families who’d had to relearn the hardships of the everyday.” Perhaps “Green Island” is Yang Ryan’s extraordinary memorial.

With the recent elections in Taiwan, “Green Island” couldn’t have arrived at a more propitious moment. The weather certainly looks fantastic for this superb writer. The recipient of the 2015 Elliot Cades Emerging Writer Award, Ryan teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her first novel, “Water Ghosts,” was published in 2009.