Page 25 of Taipei Story

“Very Zen atmosphere,” said JC. “It looks Japanese.”

As we turned back into town, I discovered that lots of things in Beitou looked Japanese: the teahouses, the Hot Spring Museum, and especially the old train station, which had once been called the Shin-hokutō Station and was now a museum. This made sense, since most of these buildings had been constructed during the Japanese colonial era. The Japanese had loved Beitou—they’d been delighted to find thermal springs so far from home.

I was starting to get a sense of what made a building design look distinctively Japanese: an elegant wooden frame, a sloped roof, and a certain meticulousness about the rocks and foliage in the landscaping. Japanese architecture struck me as intensely deliberate, as if someone had sought divine permission before placing each stone in the foundation. It was less clear to me how to define classical Chinese architecture, except that it seemed gaudier and always involved a lot of red.

I still hadn’t figured out the general Taiwanese attitude toward Japan. It did seem quite different from the general mainlander attitude toward Japan, where no amount of time could erase the hatred of the Japanese. I had grown up watching war dramas with my father. These dramas were thirty or forty episodes long, and they arrived in our mailbox in plastic-wrapped box sets. They were all about wholesome country girls who fell in love with wholesome country boys until the Japanese came and raped the country girls and massacred their families, and then the country boys went down in a heroic spray of bullets. My father was from a village formerly occupied by the Japanese, and every time we returned he made us look at the bullet holes they’d left in the walls of his old home. He could quote exactly one line from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and it was “I despise the goddamn Japs!”

My parents were not unique in this. My friend Elaine was from Nanjing and her boyfriend, Ethan, was from South Korea, and because of various Japanese war crimes in Nanjing and South Korea, neither of their parents had permitted them to visit Japan growing up. Over spring break Elaine told her parents she and Ethan were joining a group trip to Tokyo, and her father had shaken his head, sighed, and said, “I suppose your generation is different.”

However, as Teacher Sun had explained it, Taiwan’s colonial experience under Japan was much better than South Korea’s or mainland China’s. According to her, the Japanese had trod more lightly and brought modernization and education to the Taiwanese. Many older Taiwanese people had learned Japanese as their first written language and still found it easier to read Japanese than Mandarin. Compared to the chaos and brutal repression of martial rule under the Nationalists, they remembered the era of Japanese occupation as one of relative peace, prosperity, law, and order.

This seemed like a reductive way of understanding things, but the cultural evidence was apparent. I saw the ghosts of Japan everywhere, from the spare architectural lines to the omakase restaurants to the ubiquitous Japanese translations to the casual linguistic remnants I heard on the street. Sumimasen. Ojiisan, obaasan. And I had noticed that at shops, when clerks handed change back, the polite thing was to receive it with both hands and give a little bow.

So what defined this relationship? Nostalgia? Resentment?

I had no framework for making sense of this. In all my history classes, we were taught that colonialism was bad and self-determination was good. The Japanese had once colonized Taiwan, so surely this meant that the Japanese were bad. But Taiwan hadn’t achieved self-determination when the Japanese left. There was no decolonial transition here. Instead, a defeated regime came over from the mainland and put the whole island under martial rule, and now the Taiwanese were trapped between the regime that had once put them under martial rule, an authoritarian regime that wanted to absorb them into the mainland, and an imperialist regime pulling strings from across the Pacific. Not once in modern history had Taiwan been allowed to determine its own future. Taiwan had only ever been passed from occupier to occupier—indeed, to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, the Han Chinese themselves were occupiers. So who was I to say any occupier was better than the last?

BEITOU, ALAS, WAS SIMPLY NOT THAT BIG. WE ATE DINNER AT A RAMEN shack and then walked around a bit more, but it was clear that we had seen all there was to see. I consulted the internet, which informed me there was a restaurant on top of a tower on top of a waste incinerator. I suggested this to JC, but he said he wasn’t hungry anymore, and it seemed a long way to walk just to see an incinerator. After we’d looped twice around the same fried dough stand, JC suggested we head back to the hotel. When we got up to our room, he announced, “I think we should take that bath now.”

I followed him across the room. We regarded the hot tub. This, too, was smaller than we’d hoped. The promotion had made it seem like every room had its own private swimming pool. This tub was just a bit bigger than a typical bathtub, except that it was cut in a rectangle shape into the floor with a step inside where you could sit.

JC reached for the taps. “Does hot water bother you?”

What did this mean? “Does hot water bother anyone?”

“I mean, how hot?” asked JC. “Some people don’t like it super hot. They’re really sensitive about hot water.”

I wondered how many girls JC had taken baths with, and whether those girls were sensitive about hot water.

“I think whatever you like will be fine with me,” I said.

“Okay.”

He turned on the taps. We sat on the edge of the tub, waiting while the water pooled around our ankles. JC stripped off his clothes. He did this so casually that it didn’t seem like that big a deal, and so I stripped off my clothes too. I was still clinging to the hope that this experience didn’t have to be sexual. Maybe in other countries, boys and girls took baths naked with each other all the time.

“I’m cold,” said JC. “Let’s get in.”

The water came up just over our butts. The tub wasn’t so large that we could spread out our limbs. We sat facing each other, our knees drawn up to our chests. I felt like a toddler. I flapped my hands like they were fins, and JC winced as water splashed across his face.

“This is fun,” he said.

Obviously, the point of this bath was not to get clean. But if we were not to get clean, then what were we taking a bath for? I hadn’t taken a bath since I was a small child—showers seemed so much more hygienic, and anyway I could never stand bathing in that tub clotted with my sisters’ hairs. I had never been to a public bath, and I wasn’t sure what to do in this one. Was there a distinct pleasure to be found from steeping in the water? How long would we have to sit? When would we know if it had worked?

Maybe if I could have a deep and meaningful experience with the water, then this sexual business would go away. But the water didn’t seem anything special. It came out of the taps perfectly clear, not jade-green, like the water at the Geothermal Valley. It didn’t smell magical at all. If anything, it smelled faintly of rotten eggs. That must have been the sulfur, and I supposed that was proof this water really was from the springs, but I still doubted that sulfur had healing qualities, and even if it did, I didn’t have any diseases that sulfur could clear. I tried splashing the water across my cheeks. Possibly it would do something for my acne.

“Hey,” said JC.

He was now leaning against the far back wall of the tub, his elbows propped against the edges. His eyes flickered down to his crotch. I followed his gaze and saw to my dismay that he had an erection.

He scooted toward me. “I really like you, you know.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I’m really glad we got to know each other. I’m glad you’re here this summer.”

“Me too.”

“I think you’re a really special person.”