Page 33 of Taipei Story

“Neat for me.”

The bartender turned to me. “Same for you?”

I hesitated. What rocks did he mean?

“You have to drink it neat,” said Andrew. “You can add some drops of water if you want, to open up the flavor, but the only way to understand whisky is to first try it neat.”

“Okay, neat, I guess.”

The bartender slid our glasses over.

“Cheers,” said Andrew. “Ganbei!”

I drank as instructed. There were many instructions—Andrew would not stop talking. I was to sniff first, observe the color, observe the legs. What were legs? Andrew said something about spacing and ethanol molecules. I thought I saw them, but I couldn’t be sure. I could have been observing something else entirely. I was to take one small sip, hold it on my tongue, swallow, suck in a bit of air, and feel the oxygen interact with the aftertaste. Then I was to have another sip, this time focusing on the subtler notes.

“Can you taste the fruit?” Andrew asked. “The taste is really distinctive to this region. Can you taste the mango?”

It seemed important to Andrew that I taste the mango, so I nodded.

I was trying to determine how old Andrew was. He seemed familiar with all of the undergraduates, but I didn’t think he could be younger than twenty-five. He didn’t have enough hair. He wore leather sandals that were falling apart, and a faint odor accompanied him wherever he trod. It wasn’t a disgusting odor; he didn’t seem unshowered or anything. You just got the sense he had been walking around all day and things had accumulated.

He was trying to sleep with me. I might not have realized this before, but I had practice now after my day with JC. You had a good hunch if guys wanted to sleep with you if they angled their body toward yours in a certain way, like they were trying to block you off from the rest of the room. And you could tell for sure if they were being very nice to you for no reason.

I didn’t feel excited or creeped out by this. I just felt tired. How had this happened to me twice in a week? I was not especially sexy, nor did I feel I was giving out strong signals of desire. I was just available. Maybe if Andrew had seen Anna sitting alone in the library, he would be teaching her about Kavalan’s distilling techniques instead.

“So how’s your time here been?” Andrew asked. He had already drained his Kavalan Classic; now he was drinking the Kavalan Concertmaster. “Did you feel a kind of cultural awakening here in Taipei?”

“Kind of, yeah,” I said. “It’s weird. I’ve never been to a foreign country and felt—I don’t know, this instant connection.”

This was the wrong thing to say. Andrew’s face lit up, like he had been waiting to spring a trap. “The myth of consanguination,” he crowed. “You’re from the mainland, aren’t you? Yeah—Guangzhou? I knew it. I thought so. You think because you are essentially Chinese, and they are essentially Chinese, that you have anything in common. But you don’t! It’s like there was a civil war in the American heartland, and some people fled to Nova Scotia, and everyone else fled to England. And then after growing up in England, your kid visited Nova Scotia and felt this ‘instant connection.’ Wouldn’t you think that was weird?”

There were several missing steps in this argument, but I could see Andrew’s point. It was strange, perhaps unethical, for me to lay any cultural claim on this island. Still, it stirred something inside me—was that so wrong? “But probably Taiwan has more of the culture that my parents knew.” I found myself echoing what the tour guide had said at the National Palace Museum. “It’s like, not all that unreasonable that I feel some attachment.”

“But which China did your parents grow up in?” Andrew asked. “The one with all that culture, or the one under the Communists? They were probably born right after the Cultural Revolution, right? After they smashed the Four Olds? So then what would they know about authentic Chinese culture?” He took another sip of his whisky. “You know, when you think about it, it’s actually ludicrous that all you heritage speakers are hanging out in the same room.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean your parents and grandparents were all on different sides of this decades-long conflict, and it’s entirely possible that at some point they were pointing guns at each other. Think about it.” He gestured around the room with his glass. “You’ve got a kid from Hong Kong, a kid from Singapore, a kid from Beijing, and a kid from Taiwan. So you had Communists and Nationalists and peasants and landlords. Your grandparents would have killed each other, you know? But here you are, acting like the mere fact of your Chineseness is some centrifugal force. Isn’t that bizarre?”

I said it was probably easier to be collectively Chinese because none of our parents had done the actual killing. I didn’t know what evidence I had for this claim, but I was fairly sure that neither my parents nor grandparents had ever pointed a gun at anyone.

“But that’s precisely it,” said Andrew. “You’re swept up in these historical forces. That makes it even worse. You watched it all happen, and you brush over it by saying it’s fine, at the end of the day, everyone’s Chinese. What the fuck does that even mean? It only sounds like home to you because you can’t hear the difference in your accents.”

My mouth tasted bitter. No matter what I said, it seemed to prove Andrew’s point about something. I couldn’t find the problem with any one of his premises, exactly, but it was cruel of him to mock us for simply wanting to speak our parents’ language.

“Then why are you in Taipei?”

This was the right thing to say. Andrew perked up, like he had been waiting for me to ask.

“Well. So it’s kind of a long story,” he said. “When I was little, there was this Chinese family who lived down the hall in our apartment building.” The mother worked days and went to classes at night. He never saw the father around. There was a little girl a few years younger than him named Chuchu, and the grandmother, whom Andrew had called Nainai, which was what Chinese children called their paternal grandmothers, because he went over there so often that he started speaking Chinese.

“So they were your babysitters?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said. “We weren’t paying them or anything—they didn’t work for us. I just went there a lot after school, and they were always having some food, so they gave me some. Nainai used to make these huajuan from scratch. They were so good, huge and fluffy. I liked to watch her knead the dough. She’d let me sprinkle in the cut scallions. I loved the moment she took them off the stove. How the steam whooshed around her face. I really felt like I grew up Chinese, you know. Sometimes I even went home and kept speaking in Chinese, and my parents told me to cut it out.”

Andrew’s family moved out of the building when he was ten. His father had finally found steady work, and they landed somewhere with more space, fewer cockroaches. They didn’t leave behind a forwarding address or stay in contact with the Chinese family. He never saw them again. He didn’t even know their legal names.

“I think about them every day,” he said. “I loved them both so much. My Nainai. That woman raised me.”