Page 20 of Taipei Story

Baodeng told us about women in India who would stop consuming liquids at a certain point in the day so that they would not have to use public toilets after dark, because they feared they might be raped.

We all emphatically agreed with Xi Jinping on this one: toilet access was a fundamental human right.

AS IT HAPPENED, THE TOILET IN OUR APARTMENT WAS CLOGGED. IT wouldn’t flush. A little bit of water would trickle in when I pulled the handle, and then the yellow pulpy mess in the bowl would stir a little, rising higher than it had been before. “Don’t use the bathroom,” I warned Anna, and sat down to text Lee. Lee apologized: He was not in town today, but he could come tomorrow with a plumber. He asked if we had been flushing toilet paper down the pipes, and the only honest answer I could give was, Maybe?

I knew this could not be my fault, because I had carefully heeded Lee’s instructions. I always wiped myself and then folded my used toilet paper twice so that when we took out the trash bag, we wouldn’t have to touch the waste. I knew Anna did not do this, because I saw squares with brown and yellow streaks at the top of the wastebasket all the time.

I asked Anna if she had been flushing toilet paper by accident.

“Of course not,” she said.

“Well, neither have I, so how did they get clogged?”

“They’re old pipes,” said Anna. “Of course they’re going to get clogged.”

There were no public toilets in the building, so we had to run out to Youmoutoohana to pee. But Youmoutoohana closed at eleven, and then what would we do? The restroom in the park was only a two-minute walk away, but this seemed an insurmountable distance in the dark.

I always had to pee in the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep if I had even the slightest urge to pee. I had always been ashamed of my overactive bladder; it felt like a character flaw. But there was nothing I could do about that now. We had to make it to tomorrow.

I suggested we pee in plastic cups and pour them down the sink, but Anna said that was disgusting.

“The toilet isn’t that full,” said Anna. “We could just keep going in the toilet and try not to fill it up.”

“But then when the plumber comes, he’ll have a pile of sewage to plunge through.”

“So we’ll try not to fill it up that much.”

We agreed we would just try to drink as little water as we could and hope for the best. I took a nice long pee during my shower and squeezed several pumps of body wash on the floor to help it all down the drain. There were lots of Chinese phrases that could mean “to urinate,” but the one I liked was 小解. 小: little; and 解: to liberate, set free, unknot. So, to pee: a little liberation, for the moment.

PAOLO TOLD ME ABOUT A THEORY HE WAS DEVELOPING: THAT YOU couldn’t lie in a language that you weren’t good at.

“Think about it,” he said. “Do you ever lie in class? Even about sensitive topics?”

I had to discuss sensitive topics in class all the time. In Thought and Society, Teacher Cai was always asking us to express our opinions on various matters: whether health care should be privatized, whether the government should give women incentives to get pregnant. And I did, in fact, always try to tell the truth, even if I had to dumb down my opinion from “reproductive justice affects women in every stratum of society” to “childbirth is really hard.” I suppose I could have lied. But this seemed like extra work: First you had to make up an opinion you didn’t believe in, and then you had to find the Chinese words to match.

Paolo said this wasn’t what he meant. His point was rather that a low language level restored in you the naivete and innocence of a child. If your language patterns were blunt and straightforward, then so too were your thoughts. For instance, whenever he introduced himself, he said that his hobbies were films and literature. His Chinese wasn’t good enough to signal taste or pretension—he only had those basic building blocks. He didn’t know how to say “German expressionism” (though now he knew, because he had looked it up).

I asked him how this squared with his mission to use language as a shield. He admitted this disturbed him. “It is greater motivation to achieve fluency,” he said. “Until I can manipulate language in such a way as to hide my thoughts”—and the word he used for “manipulate” was the word for “knead,” like kneading pizza dough—“I will remain vulnerable.”

Maybe that was the problem between me and Anna. We couldn’t hide anything from each other. We couldn’t even be tactful, let alone deceitful. We each knew what the other wanted, and we wanted those things too much, and that was fatal.

3

Courtesy of the author

The rain broke at last. We woke to warm sunlight on our faces, and Anna made me get up early so that we could walk around across the street to get steamed buns and soy milk for breakfast.

“I like Taipei again,” Anna sang. “I like my life again.”

The steamed buns were pillowy and sweet. The soy milk came scooped out of a wooden tub, and scratched my throat in a pleasant, grainy way. I must be kinder to Anna, I told myself. She had a crush, and that was embarrassing, but she was essentially a sweet person. The sunlight made this easier to remember. I watched her nibbling her steamed bun and felt a wave of affection—the kind I would feel for a small woodland animal.

Anna left for class and I stayed at home, waiting for the laundry machine to unlock so I could hang up our clothes. I was still lounging in bed when the floor began to shake.

Something clattered inside the bathroom. I sat up, baffled. I touched my fingers to my face. I could feel the vibrations in my jaw. An earthquake? But I didn’t remember what I was supposed to do during an earthquake. Something about doorways, or getting outside—which one was it? The sidewalks were so narrow; what if the buildings toppled onto me? What was worse: being crushed by rubble, or suffocating slowly in a little pocket of air? I kept thinking of a viral video about a bed designed to withstand earthquakes by transforming into a metal cage. What good would that do?, derided the comments. Produce a steel coffin? Where you could languish for days, slowly dying from lack of food and water?

The shaking continued. I saw the water trembling in my glass—visual evidence; this was not in my head. I decided that I had time to escape. I snatched up my phone and keys and dashed down the stairs, and I had just opened the door to the outside when the tremors stopped.

I stepped barefoot into the street. Outside was bright, bewilderingly normal. Across the street, the jianbing vendor was pouring batter onto her stovetop, and a line of customers stretched around the corner, checking their phones, counting their change. Yongkang Street was crowded as always: couples walking hand in hand, mothers pushing strollers, vendors wrapping up takeout in plastic bags. Nothing looked out of place.