Page 13 of Taipei Story

I was so surprised by this question that I almost laughed. JC? Anna? When? But she really meant it. Her face was open, earnest. I had to rearrange my features into a careful, neutral expression before I could respond.

“Why do you think that?”

“Last weekend, I don’t know. I thought I felt something.” Anna twirled her pen. “You eat lunch with him, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you could perhaps mention me? Examine the . . .” She wanted to say “vibe,” I could tell, but there was no equivalent in Chinese. “Examine the situation?”

I didn’t know why I hated the prospect. I had put no thought into attempting a romantic attachment with JC myself; it seemed so wildly out of reach. So I couldn’t be jealous; we weren’t competing. But still, the sight of Anna’s wide, hopeful eyes made me squirm.

“I don’t know,” I said. “That feels kind of awkward.”

“Just be subtle—like, see if I come up. Or we could all go out to a café sometime after class. Would you suggest that to him?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Maybe this week?”

“I’ll try.” I tugged my laptop closer to me. I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. The thought of the two of them together gave me a weird itch in my side, like a mosquito bite that I couldn’t scratch. JC, walking hand in hand with Anna—no, some things were just not meant to be.

I tried to focus on my presentation. Each week we had to write an essay for Thought and Society, correct it with our one-on-one tutor, and then present it to our classmates. The essays had to be eight hundred words in length. I kept writing half a sentence, highlighting the whole document, and checking the word count. Somehow I was freshly disappointed when it grew in increments of only five or ten words.

We got to choose any topic we wanted, but this was what I got hung up on. I didn’t want to choose a topic that was too difficult, because then I would have to do the work of researching that essay, instead of just translating it into Chinese. But I didn’t want to make an easy argument that I didn’t agree with just because it fit the vocabulary and grammar I currently had at my disposal. Yet no matter how hard I tried, I kept finding my thoughts warped and flattened when I rendered them into Chinese. It was so much easier to say “Students who are sick should not come in to class” than “With the tools of distance learning, we should be able to accommodate everyone.”

This was the problem with having access to only simple grammar. It made your thinking simple too. If I had complex clauses, then I would have used them, but we were only two lessons into our textbook.

We had to use at least three grammar structures from the current chapter in every presentation. So whatever I wrote had to express the following logic.

I would ______ rather than ______.

Whatever the case may be, ______.

Although ______, it is not necessarily ______.

I strained to focus, but the mosquito bite would not go away.

Although JC had been nice to Anna, he did not necessarily like her.

Whatever the case may be, I resolved not to care.

HALFWAY ALONG THE ROAD EMERGED AN ANNA.

She wanted to join me and JC for lunch. She didn’t give me any warning. She was just waiting there in the lobby, beaming, when I came down the stairs to meet JC.

“Oh!” I said. “Hi!”

“Oh, hey,” said JC, who had just noticed she was there.

“My one-on-one tutor is out sick today,” she explained. “Where are we going?”

We decided to try the conveyor belt sushi restaurant south of campus. Since it was a single belt, there were no four-top tables, only one large table that spanned the middle of the restaurant. We had to sit three in a row at the counter. Anna and I sat on the sides, JC in the middle. Whenever someone spoke, we had to lean or twist around to make eye contact. And if I wanted to say something to Anna, or vice versa, then we had to lean forward against the counter and speak across JC. This made everything seem adversarial, though I couldn’t tell if I was the only one who felt this way. Was JC also annoyed by this intrusion? Did he also wish Anna would disappear?

Things started getting testy with the chopsticks. Every other eating accoutrement was laid out at our seat stations—napkins, dishes for soy sauce and wasabi, and even little hot water dispensers for our tea—but the chopsticks were nowhere to be found. Anna wanted to flag down the server, but he was so busy helping a queue of people settling up that we couldn’t get his attention. At last, I noticed the couple across the conveyor belt extracting their chopsticks from a drawer under the table. We crouched down, and there it was: a near-invisible line in the counter. We never could have found it ourselves.

“We should have just gotten up and asked,” said JC.

“I didn’t want to look like a foreigner,” I said.