Page 17 of Taipei Story

But she had lost the thread. Her stuttering continued; her pauses grew longer. I could see beads of sweat forming on her temples. The minutes crept toward nine o’clock. Rayer kept going, but it was clear she could not actually converse about these topics fluently in Chinese; she could only read her notes off her phone. She gave us more examples of how straight women could be queer, and then she moved on to arguing that novels about queer men were really a metaphor for the relationship between Taiwan and mainland China.

As she wrapped up, she mentioned that these novels would form the backbone of her dissertation.

This horrified me. How much of those novels had Rayer comprehended? If she couldn’t even speak of them fluently in Chinese, how could she write about them in enough detail to produce original scholarship? I had enough difficulty with the books I read in English. I didn’t feel remotely qualified to write a monograph about them.

It occurred to me that, over the course of the semester, I had never actually heard Rayer speak at length in Chinese. She was always reading vocabulary words off a prepared list or asking us to read sentences out loud from the textbook. Of course, her Chinese was better than ours, but that still did not count as good.

But if even Rayer, who was a graduate student and had spent the whole summer talking with Taiwanese friends and reading Taiwanese literature, could not articulate a basic sentence about a book she had read, then what hope did the rest of us have?

At last Rayer concluded her slides. Everyone clapped. The bookseller turned off the projector, and Rayer stepped away from the lectern. I couldn’t tell how she felt about how things had gone. Her cheeks were still flushed, and she had a loopy shine in her eyes. She was breathing hard, like she had just stepped off a treadmill.

“That was so interesting,” Anna told her. “Especially the part on Paper Marriage. I liked your argument that the straight woman is queer too.”

“Right? Queerness is such an expansive label.” Rayer zipped up her bag. “We’re heading to a bar, do you want to come?”

“We have a lot of homework,” said Anna, which was true.

“Sure, no worries.” Rayer hugged us again and insisted that we stay in touch. She was staying in Taipei for the rest of the summer doing dissertation research. We had to let her take us out to dinner. She knew some great Michelin-starred places; we had to go try this vegetarian dim sum with mushroom-based Peking roast duck. We were to reach out if we needed anything, anything at all. She would email us.

Anna and I didn’t say anything until we were a block away from the bookstore. That night, in the heat, Taipei seemed more inaccessible than ever. I couldn’t decode a single neon-lit sign.

“Maybe she’s bad at public speaking,” said Anna.

“She didn’t know the word for ‘penis,’” I said.

I’D ALWAYS TRUSTED THAT KNOWING CHINESE WOULD BE USEFUL in some professional sense, but now it seemed the options were more limited than I’d thought. I did not want to embarrass myself in academia, like Rayer, or work in military intelligence, like Skipper. So what good was my Chinese?

Early in the spring I had attended an East Asian Studies career panel at the university job fair. The panelist who had studied Chinese was a white man named Henry who worked at a think tank in DC. Everyone else gave opening remarks about the many opportunities that Japanese and Korean had opened up for them, but Henry told us he had to be straight with us. “The heyday of Sino-American relations is over,” he said. “Covid killed it all. The expat zones are dead. Economic growth has slowed, the business boom has ended, and foreign offices aren’t hiring. Education consulting firms are being shut down, which means you can’t even get jobs as private English tutors. I mean, just look at where people are going to study abroad. How many of you have heard of this one program in Taipei?”

A dozen of us raised our hands.

“Right,” said Henry. “It used to be that nobody went to that program unless they were interested specifically in Classical Chinese. The Taipei program was the ugly stepchild of Chinese language programs. The gold standard used to be a course in Beijing. But no one wants to go to Beijing anymore, it’s just not safe enough. Everyone wants to go to Taiwan, because it’s under American protection, but who knows how long that will last? This president doesn’t care about Taiwan; this president will give dictators whatever they want, and soon Taiwan will go the way of Hong Kong and then we will all be fucked.”

According to Henry, we were on an accelerated path to a great power conflict, and the channels of communication between East and West were fraying by the day. “Learning professional Chinese is now the domain of two types of people,” he declared. “Wen or wu. Literature or war. Scholars reading ancient, irrelevant Chinese novels in the ivory tower, or the DoD. Take your pick.”

That rattled me. All the attendees at that job fair had been hoping to live some kind of transpacific existence—to move back and forth between worlds. But if Henry was right, then this movement was no longer possible, and our only career option was to prepare for war.

WE HAD BEEN WARNED IN ORIENTATION THAT WE WEREN’T SUPPOSED to ask our teachers about politically sensitive issues. We might make them uncomfortable, or even worse, get them in trouble with the government. But Teacher Sun didn’t seem to care. She liked to bring up topics with no clear relevance to my readings, just to make me squirm. Did I think the United States was right to sell weapons to Taiwan? Did I think the United States would really protect Taiwan in case of an invasion? Did I think the United States was a democracy? I tried to be considerate in my answers, but no matter what I said, Teacher Sun found it hilarious. “Of course you think that,” she always said. “You’re American!”

One time I asked if she supported Taiwanese independence, and she cackled. “Why would I want that?”

“Because you’re Taiwanese?”

“I am not Taiwanese! That is to say—I am Taiwanese, but I’m Chinese too. Do you want to know where I’m from?” On her screen, she pulled up a map of mainland China. She circled some provinces in the northwest with her pointer. “My father—here. My mother—here. Our ancestral graves are in China. My whole culture is rooted in China. This place is home. This land. And you want me to be independent from that?”

“Then do you think that China should rule Taiwan?”

She cackled again. “No! I think the Taiwanese government should rule China!”

This floored me. I had never met anyone with this view. From what I understood, the soldiers who fled the mainland after 1949 had kept promising to retake it one day, but as time went on everyone gave up on that dream. For Taiwan to rule the mainland seemed as farfetched as the state government of Hawaii taking over the continental United States.

“Do you think that’s realistic in our lifetimes?”

Teacher Sun sighed theatrically. “Look. None of us could have predicted what happened in our lifetimes. Who could have anticipated the Communists? Who could have known they would take over the mainland? Who could have known the Nationalists would impose martial rule, and then who could have known Taiwan would become a democracy? What happened in the past few decades was unimaginable.” Here she used a phrase that she had been drilling me on—不可思議, “that which cannot be imagined or comprehended”—and thumped the desk. “Who knew the Berlin Wall would fall? That the Soviet Union would break apart? That China would open up? Who knew any of this would happen?” She flung up her hands. “So who knows?”

When I thought through everything I knew about China, and America, and great power politics, and semiconductors and Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, I really could not see a way forward from our current plight. But I liked Teacher Sun’s optimism. It was the simple logic that what goes up must come down. If history could smash maps and close borders and scatter families across the world, if history could cause all this destruction in the span of several decades, why wouldn’t the tides turn back? Why couldn’t the authoritarians lose power? Why couldn’t the exiled go home?

WHEN I STEPPED OUT OF THE SHOWER, I CAUGHT ANNA SCROLLING through my phone.