Page 32 of Taipei Story

“Never mind.” I wasn’t even angry anymore; I just didn’t want to be around him. “I just—fine, it’s fine.”

“Lily, don’t be like that.” Again, he did that thing with his hands. “Come on—”

“Please leave me alone.”

I hurried up the stairs. JC didn’t follow me, or even so much as call my name.

I SPENT THE LUNCH BREAK IN THE LIBRARY, TRYING TO FORCE MYSELF to read. I didn’t care about JC or Anna or anything anyone had said about me. From now on, I would live like a monk: I would devote my life to study and quiet contemplation. I flipped open to a random chapter in my Modern Chinese Literature book, and as I worked through the characters, my pulse slowed, and my ears stopped buzzing. Studying had always worked to calm me down. I liked the rhythmic dependency, the continual motion, the stable referents. There was a right and a wrong and no confusion in the middle, and if I was studying, then I was being virtuous, and no one could yell at me. I had learned this trick a long time ago, disappearing into the page.

It helped that reading in Chinese demanded intense concentration. Sometimes—very rarely—I would get into a flow and lose myself in the plot. But more often I had to go word by word, pausing every so often to look something up in the dictionary. But that took so long that often I forgot how the sentence began, or what to do with the multiple glosses of pivotal words. Complex clauses were hopeless. I always had to retrace my steps just to see how we had started on a sentence about a woman’s relationship to her mother and ended on a metaphor about geese flying south. It was like looking at a Chuck Close painting and being able to see only one little square at a time. The point always hovered just a bit beyond my grasp.

“Lily-tóngxué!”

It was Andrew, one of the older students in the program. Tóngxué, 同學, meant “classmate.” Addressing your peers as such was a distinctly midcentury thing to do. It evoked the martial discipline of a traditional Chinese classroom. No one said tóngxué except for a few white students who were inordinately obsessed with Chinese culture, and Andrew was one.

I didn’t know Andrew well. We had only spoken several times in the lounge. I had gathered that he was a graduate student, he had been in Taipei for over a year, and he was writing a dissertation about folk operas in some rural village I’d never heard of. But he was being nice to me, and so in that moment, he was my best friend in the world.

“I’m here to spread the word,” said Andrew. His accent impressed me. If I closed my eyes, I might not have clocked that he was white. “Happy hour tonight. You should come through.”

“Tonight?”

It was only Tuesday. After a year of college, I’d still held on to my Puritan conviction that weeknight drinking was for deviants.

“It’s half off for students on Tuesdays,” said Andrew. “Everyone’s going.”

I blinked at my textbook. Those pages were so safe. But I’d already fallen out of the sentence; it would take forever to work my way back in. “I’m worried I’ll fall behind.”

“今朝有酒今朝醉,” said Andrew. This chengyu had become one of the most common sayings around the department. If there is wine today, then get drunk today. Colloquially: YOLO. “I’ll email you the details. Think about it!”

I AGONIZED FOR A WHILE AT THE APARTMENT AND THEN DECIDED to go to happy hour after all. It seemed foolish to turn down any kindness at this moment. I had to make some new friends. I wouldn’t survive this next month otherwise.

It turned out that just about everyone in the program had been invited to this bar. Anna was standing in a corner with Skipper, Belinda, Margrit, and JC. Some of them glanced briefly at me when I walked in, and I knew they had just been speaking about me, because they were trying very hard to pretend like they hadn’t.

My first instinct was to turn around and leave. But this would make things worse—it would confirm I had something to be embarrassed about. Instead, I walked straight toward the bar. I kept passing people who looked familiar, who returned my gaze in a vague and friendly way, but I didn’t know their names. I realized my social circle within the program was actually so small. This made sense: I saw only the people who had the same classes at the exact same times as I did. But there were nearly two hundred students in the program, and not all of them could be friends with Anna or JC. This encouraged me. If I didn’t like the network I was in, then I could just find another one.

“Lily-tóngxué!” Someone jostled my shoulder. I turned; it was Andrew. “You made it!”

“I don’t know what I want to drink.” I was trying to decide between a lychee martini and a passion fruit spritz, both of which sounded like they’d be tastier without the alcohol.

“Can I advise?”

“Um, sure.”

He pulled the drinks menu from my hands. “Don’t bother with the cocktails. Do you like whisky?”

I tried to remember if I did. Fireball was the only whisky I knew about, and the last time I’d had Fireball, I’d been at a Thanksgiving dorm party drinking what people were calling “apple pie” shots.

“I like it fine?”

I could see Anna and JC out of the corner of my eye. It seemed like they were arguing about something. JC was talking, his head lowered toward Anna’s ear. Both of them stared forward, like they didn’t want anyone to know they were arguing. Anna’s eyes darted in my direction, and I blinked away. I wanted her to see that I had my own friends, that I was having fun, so I angled my body toward Andrew like he was the most interesting person I had ever met.

He was talking about Taiwan’s local whisky industry. “It’s very impressive what they’ve managed to do in a few short years,” he said. “They don’t have the institutional knowledge of the Scottish Highlands, right, but they’ve already become a huge market for single-malt whisky, and the whisky matures much faster here because of the tropical climate, without losing any complexity—”

The bartender asked, in English, if we knew what we wanted.

“Kavalan Classic.” Andrew said the “Kavalan” part in Chinese, but the “Classic” in English.

“On the rocks?”