Page 34 of Taipei Story

I drained my Kavalan.

“That’s why my accent is so good. I learned tones when I was young. Non-native speakers struggle so much with tones, but I got them right away.” He asked if I wanted to hear him recite some advanced chengyu, and I told him no, that was all right, I believed him.

I thought about getting up and going home. But I didn’t want to leave by myself, because then people might think I was antisocial. Also it was very late. I wasn’t sure the trains were still running, and I didn’t want to walk home by myself. I glanced around, but I didn’t see anywhere else in the room where I’d be more comfortable, so I just sat still where I was and kept rolling my whisky glass around in my hands.

My stomach rumbled. Something smelled good. I scanned the room and saw that several of my classmates had ordered pizzas. Everyone was gathered around steaming rectangular pans, except for us. I wished Andrew would wrap this up so that I too could get some pizza.

Andrew had begun to cry. I watched him for a while, wondering if the tears were feigned for my benefit.

“I feel so stupid.” He sniffled. “I don’t even have a phone number. I tried looking them up, but I can’t find them. My parents don’t know either.”

I was peeved he was making such a big deal over this. This didn’t seem like anything to truly cry over. It’s not like it was his own Nainai, and it wasn’t like they’d died or something. I also imagined that if he tried hard enough he could reconnect. All he had to do was make a viral post on the internet. People reconnected like that all the time these days. This Chuchu girl had to be on TikTok, or at least RedNote—she’d find him for sure. People would go wild over that. Maybe they would fall in love. Maybe they would become an influencer couple: East meets West.

I made a rambling suggestion to this effect, but Andrew kept shaking his head. He was absolutely certain that Nainai and Chuchu could not be reached—as if once he had left the building, the whole family had ceased to exist.

My temples throbbed. I was so thirsty. I took some sips of water, but it didn’t help. I’d never drunk anything this strong before, and I hated what it was doing to me. Andrew felt too present. My ears rang when he talked. I tried to focus, but the ringing just got louder and louder. All of his physical features seemed too close, zoomed in to garish detail. My vision did something strange then. I was unable to perceive Andrew’s face in full. I could only focus my gaze on minute details. The wet red rings around his eyes. The shine of his saliva, the glint of his single piercing. There was a fleck of potato chip stuck on his upper lip, and it wobbled whenever he talked. I kept watching, wondering when it would fall off.

At last I decided I didn’t need to tolerate this any longer. I was a big girl. I could find my way home through the city. Taipei was famously safe at night. There were a thousand other places I could be right now, and so there was actually no reason in the universe, aside from inertia, why I had to keep sitting here.

“Hey, so it’s kind of late. I’m really tired.”

Andrew didn’t seem to hear me. He just kept sipping his whisky.

“So I’m going to go now,” I said.

He wiped at his eyes.

I slid off the barstool and maneuvered around his body. Andrew didn’t stop me. Anna’s gaze flickered toward me as I moved to the door, but when she saw that Andrew wasn’t following me out, she turned back to the group.

4

Courtesy of the author

Sticky, roiling sleep. I curled up on the couch, since it was Anna’s turn to have the bed and I didn’t want to irritate her further when she got home. My stomach churned. I wished I had never touched the Kavalan. Over my freshman year I had learned of the imperative to “hydrate or die-drate,” and so I drank glass after glass of water, and then I kept having to get up to pee. Anna never came back to the apartment. Around three in the morning I moved to the bed. She was still gone at sunrise. I had two hours before I needed to be at the department and so I lay still, trying to go back to sleep. My teeth felt sour, caked in sugar, though I’d brushed them twice. I felt soiled on some fundamental level. I chugged more water, hoping it would flush out all this pollution.

I couldn’t keep my eyes shut. The sun was too bright. Our apartment was positioned so that shortly after sunrise, the sun pierced through a gap between the concrete walls of the buildings next door. But I could not get up either; I felt too sluggish. I curled on my side, away from the window. I couldn’t think of anything better to do, so I began clicking through my flash cards. By now I had amassed so many vocabulary words that I could no longer tell which lesson each belonged to. The studying app randomized the order. I could get any word at any time. 紊亂: chaotic. 狠狠地: vigorously, violently. 烤肉串: a meat kebab.

My phone flashed. A text from my mother. Call me. ASAP

I was blinking at the screen, trying to figure out whether I should call her or shower first, when a second text flashed.

I’m sorry to tell you Gonggong has passed away.

I sat up and called my mother.

“Mom?”

“Hi, Lily.”

“I saw your text.”

I wanted her to say that she had mistyped. That she had been joking, or had meant to inform me that someone else’s gonggong had passed away. But instead my mother began to cry.

My mother did not cry. I had witnessed her crying only once—one night when I was in high school, when she thought my sister Jasmine was dead—and even then she left the room when she saw me and Flora watching. This sound was alien to me. These sobs struck me as fake, the approximation of an emotion—as if I were listening not to my mother but to a recording of some other woman crying in a film, an audiobook, an audition reel. This sound and my mother had nothing to do with each other.

I wondered if I might be dreaming. I had once dreamed, in terrible detail, that my family members were one by one ripped apart by a giant wolf while I watched helpless and screaming. I jolted awake, remembered that there was no wolf, and lay there giddy with relief. The emotional memory of that nightmare was so vivid that when I came downstairs for breakfast, I ran to hug my parents. Surely this was just a bad hangover dream. I dreamed nested narratives like this sometimes; I thought I had awoken, but then strange things began to happen, and I grew more and more panicked until I woke up yet again.

“How?” I asked.