Page 16 of Taipei Story

“I met my fiancé when we were in high school,” said Margrit. “There was never a question of will we, won’t we. From the first moment we met, we understood we were two halves of a whole. So you see, I have always enjoyed a relationship of mutual infatuation. Helmut and I feel very lucky in this regard. We have never experienced the angst of adolescent romance. Everything has been . . .” She made a leveling motion with her hand. “What is the word?”

“Stable,” I supplied.

“Yes! Stable. Like an economy can be stable. Anyways, this problem was resolved for me long ago.” She patted my shoulder. “I’m sorry that’s not more helpful.”

NONE OF THIS MATTERED ANYHOW, BECAUSE THE MAIN IMPEDIMENT to looking pretty was that I was always wet.

It didn’t matter whether it was raining or not. I was wet even on the clear, bright days. I could never tell if it was sweat or condensation, but I always wore a slick second skin. Showering barely helped. It did get rid of the sweat, temporarily, but then it was impossible to get dry. Anna had blown a fuse with her hair dryer during our first week, and now we were both too scared to use it. Our towels were always damp, and our apartment was so humid that air drying never worked. Showering just turned everything in the bathroom wet—the sink, all our toiletries, even the toilet paper, if we had not remembered to remove it from the holder and place it outside the bathroom. The tile floor took the entire day to dry, which meant the only time the bathroom was remotely comfortable was the moment we came home from the department. Otherwise we padded around in standing water and dried our feet as best we could on a soggy, mildewed bathmat.

I told myself I would have to simply adjust to a different state of being. My parents were from coastal provinces; they had grown up in the heat. Maybe over time my body would adapt to my environment and my pores would shrink and my sweat glands would dry up and my ankles would get slimmer, and I would be like the Taiwanese girls I saw on the metro wearing long sleeves on a summer day without any stains on their armpits. The capacity for all of this was in my DNA. But the transformation was incomplete; as it was, I felt trapped inside my skin, and all my irritations simmered underneath with nowhere to go.

ON FRIDAY, ANNA AND I TOOK THE BUS TO FEMBOOKS, A QUEER AND feminist bookstore in Gongguan. We had been invited to a literary event by Rayer, our Marxist teaching assistant from last semester. Rayer had emailed us earlier in the week. She’d just remembered we were coming to Taipei. Had we settled in all right? She was doing a presentation on queer Taiwanese fiction on Friday at eight, and she would love if we came by.

When we reached the location indicated on our navigation app, we found a long line snaking down the sidewalk. We were impressed—so Rayer was a bigger deal than we had realized. We waited for ten minutes until I showed someone the event link and asked if they were here for the presentation. “No, no.” They pointed. There was a music hall next door. They were queueing for a concert. No one knew what event I was talking about. Anna asked where Fembooks was, and someone else pointed to a sign farther down the block.

The bookstore sat at the top of a long, narrow staircase. It was a single spacious room: well-lit, mint-green walls lined with white bookshelves. The only person inside was a girl reading on a stool by the corner. She wore a crocheted scoop-neck and neat white sandals that peeked from below her swishy white skirt. She was very pretty, and I perhaps stared at her a moment longer than I should have. She was flipping through a translated edition of Joan Didion’s The White Album. I had read only a little of The White Album for a seminar on the modern essay, from which I learned that Didion had a lot of opinions about California, that her husband had died of a heart attack, and that she was not a feminist. I wondered how those concepts had traveled in Taiwan. I wondered what this girl thought about Joan Didion, what relevance Didion had to her life, whether Didion’s ruminations on the sixties in California illuminated anything to her or if they were as far away as Bai Xianyong’s ruminations on postwar Taipei were to me.

Anna asked her, in Chinese, “Are you here for Rayer’s reading?”

The girl looked up. “There’s a reading?”

“Yeah, our teacher is talking.” Anna didn’t have the Chinese for “teaching assistant,” so she used a phrase that implied that Rayer was our professor.

“Oh, I see.” The girl glanced around for a moment. Then she placed the Joan Didion back on the shelf and picked up her bag.

After she left, we were the only people in the store. I checked and rechecked Rayer’s email, in case we’d gotten the time wrong. Eventually a bookseller emerged from a back room. Anna asked her where the bathroom was, and the bookseller pointed her down the hall. I turned my head sideways, trying to see how many of the titles I could read. The calligraphic font made it difficult. Something Something My Life. Something Something Modern Society. I kept picking books off display stands and putting them back down, unsure what I was looking for. The covers featured many abstract line drawings of breasts and vaginas and photographs of slender women in pantsuits, arms crossed, teeth flashing.

Rayer arrived a few minutes after eight. She seemed really happy to see us—she bounded over and hugged us, like we were close friends and not former students. “You came!” she cried, in English. “How are you finding the program?”

“It’s so rigorous,” said Anna. “We’re exhausted.”

“It’s worth it, though; it’s amazing for your Chinese. Are you staying at Taipei Paradise?”

We explained about the apartment, and our landlord, and how we’d read that Yongkang Street was one of the coolest neighborhoods in Taipei.

“Awesome,” said Rayer. “That’s the way to do it. You can’t spend all your time around American students, or you never get the immersive experience.”

A handful of people trickled into the store. We assembled around a conference table, and the bookseller turned on a projector. A slide read “Rayer Chang, PhD Student in East Asian Languages and Literatures.”

The bookseller stood up to address us. “We’re very glad to have Rayer with us tonight,” she said. “Last year, I was just minding my register when this young woman came in and asked if she could work here part-time. I had never had an American student ask if she could work in my store! It’s very gratifying to see Americans take such interest in Taiwanese literature. This summer, Rayer came back and asked if anyone would read through some queer Taiwanese novels for her studies, so we found some store regulars to form a reading group.”

The bookseller introduced the three other people at the table, who were in turn a publicist, a social media manager, and a graduate student in film and media studies. Anna and I traded an impressed look. It seemed so mature and bold to form a reading group with absolute strangers, and even more so to do this in another language, in another country.

“Now Rayer will summarize some of her insights for us,” said the bookseller.

Rayer stepped up to a lectern and began explaining to us, in Chinese, the novels she had read.

She began with Chen Ruoxi’s novel Paper Marriage. I knew about this novel! It had inspired Ang Lee’s film The Wedding Banquet, which is about a gay Taiwanese American man who fake-marries his Chinese tenant so she can get a green card, and so he can convince his conservative parents that he is happily married to a woman. But he accidentally impregnates her during a drunken tryst on the night of their wedding, and hijinks ensue. Rayer explained that Paper Marriage wasn’t technically a queer novel, since it was written by a heterosexual woman. But perhaps heterosexual women could access a kind of queerness in their own way. For instance, could we not judge the strategy of marrying to resist the violence of borders a queer act of defiance against the heteronormative institution of marriage? An undocumented immigrant was queer. A tenant who could not pay their rent was queer. In fact, Rayer argued, anyone who fell outside the strictures of the neoliberal heteronormative state was queer.

“Huh.” Anna raised her hand, but the bookseller said that Rayer would take all questions at the end.

Next, Rayer told us about Zhu Tianwen’s novel Notes of a Desolate Man. Another title I had heard of! This one I had read in translation for a Contemporary Chinese Fiction class. I didn’t like it very much, because it struck me as a mawkish, stereotypical account of a homosexual man with a sex addiction whose friends were dying of AIDS. I liked it even less when I learned that the author was a straight woman (Rayer seemed only to have read straight women writing about gay men). While researching a term paper about this book, I had found that a lot of other critics disliked the text precisely because it portrayed gay Taiwanese men exclusively as sex addicts dying of AIDS. According to Rayer, this book was a meditation on the aesthetic shallowness of globalization, and the sex addiction was a metaphor for rampant consumerism.

She moved on to a book I hadn’t heard of. It had a dark cover that looked a bit like a vagina and a bit like the sea. “Now, this text is really interesting, because it is one of the first Taiwanese texts to linger in the—in the . . .” She stumbled, then reached for her phone. She blinked at her notes. “To linger . . .” Her cheeks flushed red. “Sorry,” she said, in English. “One second.”

“The female gaze,” supplied the bookseller.

“Right,” said Rayer. “As I was saying—this text lingers in the female gaze, an—an eroticism, without the men.”