Page 18 of Taipei Story

“What are you doing?”

She set it down, quickly enough that I knew she knew she’d done something wrong. “I was just having a look.”

She used the double verb construction for “look”—看看, kàn kàn—which in Chinese could lessen the weight of a verb. To 看 was intense; to 看看 was innocent; no big deal. But this was a big deal, and the shock of betrayal was paired with a searing satisfaction—that I was right to hate her, that all my irritation was earned.

I unlocked my phone. She’d been looking through my texts with JC. He had asked me what I wanted to have next for lunch—the Korean bibimbap place or the Singaporean noodle shack. How had I handled the Chongqing hot pot, ha ha. Sweat emoji, poop emoji.

“I saw he texted you,” said Anna, like this justified anything.

“But that’s my phone.”

“Well, you know I like him.”

“But you can’t just look through other people’s phones.”

We had lapsed back into English; our Chinese could not accommodate our shades of implicature. In English, Anna was savvier; there was an edge to her voice, the baby-doll facade fell away, and I saw the cunning behind it. She knew what she wanted, and she knew I was in the way. Anna had a better read on the situation than I’d thought.

“But it’s nothing private, right?” Her tone was forced, chipper. “Like, you guys just have lunch?”

“But, Anna.” I wanted to slap that brazen look off her face. My sister Flora wore that look all the time—when she raided my art supplies, read my diary, or borrowed my clothes without asking. It was the look of haughty entitlement. All my things were hers. “You just—I mean, this is a very big invasion of privacy. You can’t do that.”

“Okay, I’m sorry.” She waved her hands. “That was wrong, I’m so tired, I wasn’t thinking.” But she said this in a brisk, cheery tone, as if what transpired had been a glitch, as if she hoped I’d just forget about it. She was not sorry at all.

But she was extra solicitous over the next few days, buying me bubble teas and tofu puddings without asking, and she stopped leaving her shoes inside the apartment, so I tried to stop being mad at her. We still had to live together, and I couldn’t be looking over my shoulder all the time. The Cold War’s Schrödinger resolutions made sense to me now. Some conflicts were better left alone.

THE NEXT MONDAY WE WERE REQUIRED TO ATTEND AN AFTERNOON guest lecture about Taiwanese politics by someone named Professor Liao, a researcher at Academia Sinica. None of us had any interest in Taiwanese politics, but we were still excited for the lecture. All new encounters were tests of our language capabilities. If we could comprehend a full lecture in Chinese, then, wow—we were truly on the path to fluency.

I was feeling pretty good when Professor Liao began the lecture, because he said lots of platitudes about how excited he was to be speaking with American students, how wonderful it was that we were committed to learning Chinese and to furthering the Sino-American relationship. Those were easy phrases; we’d heard them a dozen times. But then he got to the matter at hand, and I couldn’t understand him at all.

The problem was that he kept circling back to a certain keyword, but I didn’t know what it meant. I thought it had to do with the local electoral system. Something about recalling elected officials. Something about corruption. When I looked up the phrase in my dictionary app, I only got definitions of the individual words, but they didn’t add up to anything intelligible. It was clearly a term of art, but without context, I couldn’t puzzle it out.

I could understand all the words around that phrase, the connective tissue. What I understood: This THING was of immense contemporary import. The THING was at the center of intense academic disagreement. I even understood, because I had learned the grammatical structure that morning, that the THING was of paramount importance to all related actors.

I could tell, from the blank expressions around me, that no one else knew what the THING was either. Professor Liao made a point, and we all nodded. He asked if there were any questions before he moved on, and we all shook our heads. We had all mastered the uncomprehending nod and smile, the face you put on when you had no idea what the other person was saying, or when you had blanked out and now couldn’t find your way back into the sentence. The smile was discreet. You couldn’t smile too big or seem too excited, or it would seem like you had an opinion. But since we were all so good at this smile, Professor Liao thought we knew exactly what he was talking about.

As he finished his lecture, Professor Liao told us that he was so impressed with our commitment to Chinese. “You should be very proud of yourselves,” he said. “Your language abilities are truly remarkable. I’ve delivered this lecture just as if I were speaking to undergraduates here in Taiwan. So if you could understand this, then you are fluent enough to take university courses in Chinese.” He asked again if there were any questions, but nobody raised their hand.

IN MY ONE-ON-ONE CLASS, I KEPT GETTING STUCK ON THE GAP BETWEEN the technically correct sentence and the sentence that a native speaker would compose.

My frustration was compounded by the fact that Chinese didn’t have rules of grammar. At least, Chinese didn’t have rules that paralleled the extensive grammatical skeletons of Latin or other Romance languages. Chinese didn’t have masculine or feminine forms. Chinese verbs weren’t conjugated, nor did they have tenses. To say “I run” or “I am running” or “I have run” or “I ran,” you would use the same characters: 我跑, “I” + “run.” You had to add other words—clues about time, when you started doing something or when you ended it—to make clear when this action occurred.

But this didn’t mean Chinese followed no rules at all. There were distinct parts of speech, and accepted ways of combining those parts of speech. You learned these through pattern recognition, which was why so much of class was spent fitting new words to patterns, and why we had to replicate these patterns in our essays. But there were always exceptions to the patterns, and you wouldn’t know about these exceptions until someone told you they were wrong. But even then, they might not give you a reason they were wrong. Sometimes, when Teacher Sun corrected my phrasing, her only explanation was that “It’s not how a Chinese person would say it. It just sounds weird.”

All this meant that there was no systematic way to go about studying Chinese. In high school Latin classes, I had gone from the general to the particular. In studying Chinese, I had to go from the particular to the general. It was all trial and error, a game of volume: You had to throw yourself at the language over and over again and hope you absorbed enough unwritten rules that eventually your one-on-one teacher stopped laughing at you.

NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN NECESSARY HAD I SIMPLY learned Chinese the way I was supposed to. Had I learned Chinese the way a child did, at a child’s pace, and with a child’s expansive brain, I could have avoided the shameful diaspora adolescence—the nervous giggle, the “sorry, my Chinese is very not good,” the disappointed elders, the menus I couldn’t read, the tattoos I couldn’t translate. My mother loved sending me WeChat videos of white men reciting Tang poetry with perfect Beijing accents. “Look,” she would say, “isn’t that impressive?” If these gringos could pick it up, why couldn’t I?

But where would I have picked it up? Who would have taught me?

There was Chinese school on Sundays at the local community college where we dug our pencils into dried gum stuck to the bottoms of our desks and tried not to perish from boredom while my friend Michelle’s father led us through recitations of pinyin vowel-consonant combinations in all four tones and taught us the stroke orders of the most common radicals. We traced the simplest characters again and again inside printed square boxes: 一, 二, 上, 下; one, two, up, down. The classroom atmosphere was authoritarian, as I presumed Michelle’s father’s village education had been. It was important to our parents that we get a taste for the old country discipline. We were expected to stand in unison and yell, “Hello, Teacher!” when class began, and then to bow and shout, “Thank you, Teacher!” once the interminable three hours were over.

Once, Michelle’s father caught me doodling under my desk, and he made me pass my sketchbook around the room for everyone to see. “Explain what this is!” he shouted. I had drawn Luke Skywalker, except he was a cowboy, and he was riding on a horse with me, dressed as Maid Marian, the fox version, and his hands were around my waist, and I had boobs. But since I couldn’t say any of those things in Chinese, all I could manage was “I had a dream.”

There were recitations—so many recitations. Every few weeks we were handed a snippet of classical Chinese literature—a passage from the Analects, a line from the Zhuangzi, a piece of Tang poetry—and made to memorize it for a ceremonial recitation before an audience of all our classmates and their parents. Generations of children before us had learned Chinese by memorizing the classics. This practice would instill the music, the rhythm, of our language in our bones. But the only thing that stuck with me years later was a poem written by a seven-year-old about geese, and then only the first line of that poem: Geese, geese, geese!

You couldn’t learn Chinese this way. This wasn’t a lived language. This was a source of shame, an eye roll, a minute hand ticking through molasses. This was stroke orders traced a thousand times without ever leaving an imprint on our minds, and Tang poetry memorized in a blind panic in cold, musty hallways. This was words written on water.

The worst part was how my parents adored these recitations. The geese poem thrilled them. The Analects nearly drove them to tears. I could see it in their eyes: They were dreaming of four-square courtyards and village schools. And when we drove home, when my sisters and I resumed chattering in English, it felt like a terrible indulgence. I knew what my parents longed for: a parallel set of daughters, locked into the safe conservativism of their past, who weren’t corrupted by American values, who didn’t suffer these baffling American disorders. But I couldn’t give that to them, not unless I traveled back in time and stopped them from coming here in the first place.