Page 10 of Taipei Story

She wrote some characters on the board: 打不開, 看得到, 穿不上. Can’t open it, can see it, can’t wear it.

“Oh!” I said. “Well, that’s easy. That’s just . . .” But I had no way to articulate how this pattern worked. I didn’t even know how to translate it to English. I knew exactly what these words meant, but only in Chinese.

“It is an extremely difficult grammatical structure! I have American students who can never get over this. I have students doing advanced research in Classical Chinese who still do not have an intuitive grasp of the resultative ending. But you don’t struggle with it at all. Do you know what this means?”

“That I will learn faster?”

“No!” Her voice shot up in pitch. “It means you are lazy. I know your type! Some things come easy to you, so you think everything will. But in fact, you are more prone to making mistakes, because you trust an inner ear that only works some of the time. You will have a very difficult time developing a more sophisticated grammar repertoire unless you treat Chinese as seriously as you would any foreign language—like French. Okay, Lily?”

I had the sudden urge to cry. “Okay.”

“Good! Now, today’s vocabulary!” She pointed to her computer monitor. “症狀—use this in a sentence!”

When our fifty minutes were up, I felt like I had been electrocuted. Teacher Sun asked me if I was otherwise adjusting well to Taipei, and I said that for the most part everything was fine, except for the mosquitoes.

“Ah!” she screamed. “Get a Japanese spray!” She pulled up the brand on her monitor so that I could recognize it at Watsons: a bright blue tonic with a katakana label. “It has an ingredient that’s banned in the US. I don’t know. Maybe it’s poison—maybe it will make your children deformed, ha ha. But it will absolutely stop the itching!”

I WAS STARTLED TO SEE SUNLIGHT WHEN I LEFT THE BUILDING. IT was only four in the afternoon; I felt, spiritually, that it was two in the morning. I thought of the hours of homework I had been assigned, and I wanted to shrink into a ball.

Anna was beat too. She hadn’t waited for me in the student lounge—she texted that she had already gone home. We had meant to check out a nearby café after class, but she was, as she put it, fighting for her life. She had written this in Chinese, so it read like “waging a war on the behalf of me.” When I returned to the apartment, she was sprawled facedown on the couch, her textbooks strewn on the floor beside her. I nudged her ankle. She moaned. I adopted the same position on the floor, and we lay there in silence for a moment, stirring only to scratch at our bites.

We tried to figure out why we were so tired. The conversation was halting, but after much dictionary consultation, we worked out a theory. In high school, this kind of schedule had been effortless. We were in class from eight to four every day, with homework afterward, and this was just normal. But one year of university, with days where we had only one class in the afternoon, or days when we didn’t have class at all, had spoiled us. We were incapable of doing good, hard work now. We were doomed.

“We will get tougher,” said Anna. She tapped at her phone and read, “We will be tempered a hundred times to become steel.”

But I did not feel like steel. The novelty had worn off. Nothing about Taipei was exciting anymore; not the colorful IC metro cards, not the abundance of milk tea shops, not the clean public bathrooms, not the buses and trains that ran so miraculously on time. All I could notice were the indignities: how the tap water was not safe to drink; how we had to refill our water bottles from a dispenser in the hallway; how the laundry machine never fully dried our clothes, only made them hot and wet, so that we had to drape them over the chairs, the bed, the windowsill, every surface with an edge; how this room, which was clearly too small for two people, had no chairs or desks. To do our homework we had to sprawl on the bed, which hurt our necks; or we would have to go to a café, and this meant venturing back out into the heat, the mosquitoes, spraying another full-body layer of sticky, staining Off! The vacation was over. We were here to work.

2

Courtesy of the author

By the end of the week, we had settled into a routine. Every morning Anna and I went out for breakfast: some combination of cut fruit, steamed wheat buns, soy milk, and braised tea eggs from the 7-Eleven around the corner. Anna showered first and left for the department, and then I showered and left an hour later. I spent two hours in class, and then I met JC for lunch. I felt a thrill every time I came down the staircase and saw him waiting in the lobby. I always assumed this was the day he would find other plans or decide I was not as interesting as he’d thought. But he was always there. John Cahan-Song could have had lunch with anyone in Taipei, and still he wanted to have lunch with me.

We tried a new lunch spot every day. So far we’d had Indonesian stir-fried noodles, Korean soft tofu stews, and shrimp wonton noodle soups. We still had not managed to obtain onigiri, but we held out hope. I learned that JC was anxious about his future; that he didn’t want to be a professor because both his parents were professors and he didn’t want to spend his whole life in their shadows, but he wasn’t sure what else to do with a degree in sociolinguistics; and that he did love his sister, but due to his poor estimation of her current boyfriend, whom she had met at a conference for influencers, they were not talking at the moment. I, too, was not talking to my sisters at the moment. JC asked if they were also dating losers and I said no; one liked to pretend I didn’t exist, and the other was a spoiled brat. We agreed: Families are tough.

In the afternoons, Anna waited for me in the student lounge until the end of my one-on-one class, and we returned to the apartment together. Most days we stopped for bubble tea or sweet tofu pudding along the way. Then after some “recovery” time—Anna lay facedown on the bed, and I lay faceup on the couch—we went to one of the cafés along our alley to do our homework. Anna liked Come True Coffee because they served wobbly three-inch tall soufflé pancakes with ube syrup. I liked Youmoutoohana because they served osmanthus barley tea with free refills of hot water, and because they played moody covers of English songs sung in such a thick Japanese accent that the lyrics were unintelligible.

We often worked at the cafés until closing; this meant no matter what, we stopped studying at eleven o’clock sharp. We agreed we had to prioritize our sleep; we could not pull all-nighters. We had discovered that the secret to surviving such an intensive language program was accepting that we were never fully prepared for class. I had always been a diligent student: I liked to double-check my homework, to quiz myself on my vocabulary lists until I was certain I knew all the words by heart. Here this was impossible. There was just too much to do. There was no time to study—only to frantically absorb enough material to make it through the next day’s class.

Despite this, the language was sticking. The transformation was happening as promised. I no longer had to strain for those common linkage words: “because,” “therefore,” “however,” “despite.” Forced, constant repetition smoothed the awkward hesitation over everyday phrases. I could now comment on the weather. I could now make reservations for a table for two.

My sentence structures were improving too. I knew more complex clauses, and I could hold longer thought patterns in more nuanced logical relation to one another in my head before I said them out loud. It felt so cool to utter a thought without repeating it in my mind several times beforehand. I could just think, and what came out was what I meant. I felt the best when I could get to the end of a sentence without pausing to find a word—when all the vocabulary was present and fell neatly into place. My mental machinery was oiling up—I could almost hear the satisfying click, whir.

“Be it granted that we might lay equal emphasis on moral, intellectual, physical, and social education, at the same time it cannot be denied that intellectual achievement is the standard generally recognized by most people in higher education,” I said in one breath, without pausing.

Teacher Sun clapped. “Wow!”

I STARTED HEADING TO THE DEPARTMENT EARLIER AND EARLIER every morning so that I could practice my Chinese with whoever was around in the student lounge. I wasn’t as anxious about bothering strangers here as I was at home. The stakes of a conversation were different when we were both bad at the medium. The normal rules governing social boundaries did not apply. Nothing was too intrusive. You could just walk up to someone and say, “Classmate, you look like you are an athlete—is it true?”

Our program attracted a lot of non-American international students, who fascinated me because I always forgot other countries had their own bilateral relationships with China. I liked hearing international students speak Chinese, because I could somehow always make out their regional accents. There were such things as German-accented Chinese, Italian-accented Chinese, and French-accented Chinese. I couldn’t pinpoint the sound changes behind them. I just knew they were there.

I spent most mornings chatting with a German girl named Mageli—Margrit. Margrit’s parents were missionaries, so she had spent her childhood in Nanjing, and therefore spoke with a better accent than most of us. Margrit told me that all of her aunts and uncles worked in various Sinology departments across Europe. She showed me an abstract of a paper her uncle had co-authored on Yunnanese folk theater. “It’s in the family,” she said. “I don’t know why, but we all happened to develop a deep academic interest in China.”

Everyone was a bit in love with Margrit. She had long dancer’s legs and wavy blond hair, and she always wore these silky maxi dresses that clung around her curves. Margrit was not much older than I was, but she already had a fiancé, Helmut, who was studying livestock agriculture in Zürich. Helmut and Margrit’s dream was to take over Helmut’s uncle’s sheep farm when he retired. They always spoke on the phone during Margrit’s lunch breaks, when Helmut had just woken up. Most afternoons, as I set off with JC, I saw Margrit smiling and pacing in the walkway in front of the department. Once she turned Helmut around so that he could say hello, but he didn’t seem that interested in me.

If Margrit wasn’t in the lounge, I spent my mornings chatting with an Italian undergraduate named Baoluo—Paolo—who had a long, pensive face and wore his hair in an oily braid that reached the small of his back. In addition to his native Italian and Venetian, Paolo was also fluent in French, German, and English. He was slowly working toward a bachelor’s degree in geography, which he explained was sort of like social studies and international relations mixed together. It was slow going because he kept taking time off to backpack around the world. Chinese was his third Asian language—he had spent some years of high school in Japan, and he had a pen pal in South Korea.

I asked Paolo why he loved learning languages so much. He told me it had all started in middle school. He was learning French in class and discovered that if he kept his diary at home in French, then his parents, whom Paolo described as “not educated people,” would never find out what he was thinking about. As his need for secrecy grew—he didn’t specify why, only that it did—he had to resort to more and more languages to keep his thoughts hidden from the world.