Page 30 of Taipei Story

My despair grew as Teacher Sun took me through everything that marked the difference between my writing style and a native speaker’s style. I would never have clocked these mistakes. I had no idea these were things you shouldn’t do. I had placed a causative clause after the explanation. I kept using a certain introductory phrase where I should have used a different one. Sometimes what I’d written was grammatically correct, but a native speaker would have employed a slightly different word order. Why? There was no why. There were no rules. There was a certain rhythm that came naturally to native speakers, but I didn’t have the ear for it. All I could do was try to internalize some general guidelines. I had to compose in parallelisms, I had to use four-character strings instead of three, and I had to insert random characters for emphasis (whose meanings I could never keep straight), except for when it was inappropriate to do so, but I couldn’t know when that was.

I thought about the many English essays I had been forced to edit by the Chinese parents’ mafia network over the past year. In December of my senior year of high school, word got around in my father’s village that I had been accepted to Yale, Yéluˇ , and then everyone was asking my father if I would look over their child’s work. Every few weeks my dad would text me something like, Hey, Qiuqiu’s mother wants some help. Are you available? And if I said I wasn’t available, he would remind me that Qiuqiu’s mother had once brought eight-treasure soup to my mother when she was in labor with my sister, and so we really owed her one.

Once I was asked to edit my cousin’s application essay to a summer program in New York. My cousin styled herself Vicky in English, though she had never been outside China; she had chosen the name because of the film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The moment I opened Vicky’s essay I understood I was not being asked to do some light editing but rather to rewrite Vicky’s essay from scratch. Her writing was incomprehensible. She used rules of capitalization, punctuation, and spacing completely at random. I didn’t understand how Vicky had messed these last two up, because Chinese also had rules about punctuation and spacing, and they weren’t all that different from the English rules. I had a sneaking suspicion that Vicky had half-assed her essay because she knew that I was going to rewrite it for her, and this made me feel exploited. I called my father to complain. “Vicky clearly can’t speak English.”

“Of course she can,” he said. “She’s been learning it every day in high school.”

“Well, then she’s clearly not paying attention, because this is gibberish.”

“Be nice, Lily.”

“I wouldn’t feel responsible sending this in.” I tried to pretend I was acting in Vicky’s best interest, but I was just being mean. “She’s not prepared for a whole summer in New York. She’s going to struggle.”

My father gave me a lecture about supporting our extended family and how Chinese immigrants had only ever gotten ahead because they looked out for their own, and finally I agreed to do my best to clean it up. I determined to put in as little effort as Vicky had. I took out all the obvious mistakes, but I made no effort to replace her half-thoughts with substantive ones, or to reorganize the logical flow of her statements. The essay had no thesis; it read like experimental poetry. I have always dreamed of improving my English, among Americans. New York is a magical city—Friends. In the end Vicky never came to New York that summer, and everyone intimated that this was my fault.

But in Chinese, it turned out, I was just as bad as Vicky. This terrified me: the possibility that no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t even understand what I had done wrong.

ALL DAY LONG, I HAD FELT THAT SOMETHING WAS OFF AT THE DEPARTMENT.

It wasn’t just the heat wave. I was sure people were looking at me, but I couldn’t catch anyone in the act. The back of my neck kept prickling. I saw Margrit and Paolo whispering at the lockers, but when I entered the student lounge, they stopped talking. It was nothing I could put my finger on, but there were too many signs. I couldn’t be imagining them all.

The last time I had felt like this was in the fall of my freshman year. My period came while I was at the gym, and I thought some eyes were lingering on me, but it wasn’t until I got home that I saw the red stain that had spread all over my butt cheeks and crotch.

In the bathroom after class, a girl I hardly knew came out of the stall, glanced sideways at me, and seemed to stare a second longer than normal. After she left, I checked my appearance in the mirror. No crotch stains. No toilet paper stuck to my shoes. I stretched my mouth wide open to check my teeth, but I saw nothing there.

I RAN INTO ANNA AT THE APARTMENT, JUST AS SHE WAS STEPPING out with her backpack. We crossed paths on the staircase. She flinched when she saw me, as if I’d jumped out at her from behind a corner. “Oh, hi.”

“Hey,” I said. “Are you going out to study?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” I knew better than to ask if I could join her. “So I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah, okay.” She stepped past me, paused, and then turned. “Hey, you know people are talking about you.”

My eyes prickled. I clenched my jaw; I didn’t want her to see me cry. “Okay?”

“So you do know.” She shrugged. “Okay, so.”

“Am I supposed to care?”

“I mean. I guess I would want to know if people were saying I gave JC a blow job in a hot tub.”

I had known this was coming. Deep down I had suspected it all day, but still hearing it out loud felt like a hammer against my chest. “What?”

“Everyone’s talking about it. Like, they wouldn’t shut up about it in the lounge.”

“But we—but I didn’t do that. The blow job, I mean.”

Anna looked me up and down. Her face churned through several expressions, as if she was trying to decide whether or not to feel sorry for me. “Okay?”

“I really didn’t.”

“Look, I don’t really care what you and JC got up to.” She shrugged her backpack higher on her shoulders and moved toward the door. “But—yeah, that’s what they’re saying. Just so you know.”

THE NEXT DAY, AT LUNCHTIME, I WAITED AT THE BOTTOM OF THE stairs for JC. He flinched when he saw me, the same way Anna had. What were they so afraid of?

“Can I talk to you?”