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threatening to the local population.  It showed the growing influence of American soft power on the island.  Even the names were threatening: Thunderbird ; Camaro ; Firebird ; Mustang ; Corvette .  They were names that standard Chinese language had to accommodate and the feeling on the island was much the same.  Since the Formosa Resolution in 1955, the United States began to take a second look at the island of Taiwan.  It was a long second look.  The Americans, convinced the island wouldn’t come under communist rule like its larger cousin, thought the island had potential.  Twenty-five years after the Resolution, the island was starting to industrialize.  The undisputed ruling party, the Kuomintang, leaned westward.  The Kuomintang lived under heightened anxiety that the island was incubating pockets of communist sympathy.  The island was under military rule.  Any academics, scholars or writers who had published or reported communist sympathies had to fend for themselves against the harshest of critics, the Kuomintang.
    On a fair-weathered day in the late spring of 1980, there was a large cloud of anti-communist feeling that hung over Taipei.  But the cloud had a silver lining.  It was a boon for economic prosperity and trade with the West.  She was one such silver-liner.  She moved to Taiwan for her own economic prosperity.  Her hair was tied into a ponytail that waved like a black silk flag in the wind.  Her head was covered by a red motorcycle helmet.  The helmet was the old-fashioned kind that didn’t include a visor.  It was the kind tailored for Harley-Davidson enthusiasts, a literal bucket.  But she wasn’t riding a Harley .  Her green Vespa motor scooter was more piglet than hog.  Still, it carried her where she asked it to, all over Taipei.  The light of the sun gave sheen to her honeysuckle skin as bits of sweat slid down her cheeks as diamonds—a prize from the heat.  For a woman in her early thirties, she could have turned the heads of men any age.  She was born and raised in Kuandian, a tiny Northeastern town on the Chinese mainland.  She had a promising start in middle and high school and studied economics and English at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics in Dalian.    She had hopes of going into politics and scaling the ranks of the Communist Party becoming a Senior Advisor.  She was forced to change her plans when nature’s rent was two months overdue.  In December of 1966, she had gone to the hospital to confirm what she already knew, she was pregnant.  The father was a classmate.  He wanted her to abort; she wasn’t going to.  In the late sixties in the People’s Republic of China, he had no choice so he married her.  She dropped out of university to raise their child, a daughter.  He would graduate and join the Communist Party and they would be a happy family, but that plan, like the one before, changed. 
    Xiaofeng was a good baby.  She seemed prepared for any reality, especially a harsh one.  She never cried and would fall asleep when expected.  She was a dutiful daughter; she knew her role.  Despite her perfection as a daughter, it could not fill the holes in her father.  He could never come to love a child he had never wanted or a wife that society forced on him.  When Xiaofeng was three weeks shy of being sixteen months old, he left.  There was no warning, no letter and no goodbye. Xiaofeng’s mother knew her father was leaving the morning that became the last.  He said he would be back in the evening, like he had to say it, like he had to marry, like he had to be a father.  He said it exactly as if he didn’t want to.  She heard it in his voice.  It was the same on their wedding day and she was ready for it.  Deep down, Xiaofeng’s mother always knew he would leave, though more than eleven years had followed she had never tried to chase him.  Leaving was what he wanted, so she gave it to him.  She took advantage of the law at the