Page 38 of Taipei Story

I blanched. “I mean—he was my grandfather?”

“Are you going to the funeral?”

“I can’t, I don’t have a visa.”

“I see.”

For a moment nobody said anything. I leaned against the door frame. I felt dizzy. This encounter felt staged, uncanny. It felt as if we were all uttering lines off a script we’d never seen before, but there was no director, and no one was inflecting in quite the way they should. The stakes were so random and unexpected. How were we supposed to behave? The silence held another moment, and then Anna turned to Margrit and asked, “Can I stay at yours tonight?”

“Oh—yes, sure.”

Anna stomped around the room, shoving more things into her backpack—some clothes, some cans of Off!, an assortment of toiletries. I wondered if she’d dare take our shared body wash. I wondered how long she would stay away. “Okay, let’s go,” she told Margrit, and they made their way toward the door. Margrit ducked her head as she passed me. “So sorry for your loss,” she said again.

“Anna,” I said.

She turned around. Her face was very pale, and there were two bright spots of color in her cheeks. I could have told her then that I was hurting, and I needed her, and I was sorry. But that demanded more words than I had at the moment.

I pointed to the table. “You forgot your notebook.”

NOW THE WAR WAS WON, AND I HAD THE APARTMENT ALL TO MYSELF.

I washed my face. I cleaned my phone with an alcohol wipe. I changed my shirt and stuck it in the washer. Then I sat on the couch, wondering how to make the hours pass.

It was so dark inside this apartment. The incinerating beam of morning light was gone; now I was swathed again in the shade. The ceiling lights barely worked. I pulled back all the curtains, but that didn’t help. Our window opened onto another, taller, apartment building, and we sat in its shadow. This was the problem with Taipei: so little space and all these people, and buildings to house the people; they had nowhere to go but up, and we were trapped in walls against walls. How had I spent so many weeks in such a dark little box? I sucked in air, expanded my lungs as far as they would go, and still I felt like I was suffocating.

Every worldly problem culminated in the dimness of this apartment. Modernization was a mistake, overpopulation was a mistake, apartments were a mistake, climate change was making Taipei unlivable, and all these things had conspired to make me, in this specific moment, miserable.

I opened my messaging app several times and closed it. Those texts were still there; I hadn’t imagined them. I’m sorry to tell you Gonggong has passed away. I always did this with bad news. It had never worked. I always tried to convince myself I was in a nightmare, and I was so disappointed when I didn’t wake up.

MY GRANDMOTHER DIDN’T KNOW YET THAT HER HUSBAND WAS dead.

Popo’s health hadn’t been good for a while, especially after her stroke. I remembered seeing a video of her rolling out in a wheelchair and feeling stunned by the transformation. In my memory, Popo was vibrant and clever, always poking fun at my mother and sisters. Popo liked to go on long walks, pushing her arms at her sides in a way I associated with eighties aerobics videos. Popo was not this thin, white-haired creature whose face was all slack, drooping on the left.

When she’d lived with us, Popo had been so proud of how good she looked, even at seventy. She’d still had a head of black hair that she wore short, professionally permed, and she never went outside unless carefully dressed in a smart blouse over trousers. “I kept my figure,” she would tell me, running her hand up and down her waist. “I look younger than everyone my age, don’t I?” 身材—stature, physique; I knew this word early because my grandmother and my aunts used it so often. They were so concerned with how to 保持身材, how to maintain that good physique. Practice tai chi daily. Be moderate with sweets. The Chinese word for “muscle” was also engraved in my memory, because Popo talked about it all the time: 肌肉. It sounded just like the word for “chicken,” 雞肉, so that when she showed me how she slapped her arms and legs to keep the blood circulating, I was forever picturing her as a raw, supple chicken.

I asked my mother if they were keeping the news from Popo because they were afraid her heart couldn’t take it. It was a stupid question, but I had to know. I couldn’t leave anything to inference or translation. I wanted to know every detail and its implications.

“I really don’t know,” said my mother. “Gonggong was her whole world. They were together all day, every day. You know, he was looking after her when he fell.” This was the third time she had told me this. Every time, she uttered it in a dazed voice, like she still didn’t know what it meant. “He was turning around, looking to see if she was all right, and then he fell.”

THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE UP AT FOUR THIRTY AND CALLED A cab. I could afford it; I had been hoarding my scholarship cash. The internet cautioned that the ride to Taoyuan could take between half an hour and ninety minutes, depending on traffic. I could not be late. I left hours early just in case. But there wasn’t any traffic at all, and the drive was eerily smooth. All the lights were green. I fell asleep shortly after I got inside the cab and was disappointed when the driver told me I had arrived. Only thirty minutes had passed. So much more day stretched before me.

I’d never seen an empty airport. It looked unreal; most of the lights weren’t on yet. I stepped inside and tried to see if I could make the airport transform into an open soccer field. I was playing mental games with myself again. I still thought that if I could concentrate hard enough, I could convince myself that none of this was happening, and that this dreamscape would disappear. In the past, I had occasionally been able to achieve lucid dreaming in the middle of a nightmare: I willed, and then I could fly. But the linoleum flooring was too solid. I couldn’t turn it into grass.

My mother’s flight came up on the arrivals board: San Francisco to Taipei, on schedule.

I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know how to comfort my mother; I had never figured it out. She and my father had fought often when I was younger. Money was always involved; the lessons we could not take, the flights to China we could not afford. My father wore his emotions on his sleeve. He would smash things, shout, and storm out of the house. It always passed quickly; he had to get it out of his system, and then he would be all right. But my mother turned into stone. She disappeared behind a death mask. You couldn’t tell what she was thinking, and she wouldn’t tell you. She could stay like this for days. No amount of coaxing or apologizing could snap her out of it. Only she could decide when to put us out of our misery.

It was the worst when we were the cause of her anger, when we’d really done something wrong. She would say such cryptic things. “One day you will not have a mother or father,” she would tell me. Or, if I ever fought back, she would say, “Would you prefer that I leave your life forever?” I never knew if she meant this as a threat, or if she herself was afraid—if she was musing out loud about a world where, for reasons unexplained, she couldn’t be with us. Either way, this terrified me. This made me work very hard to regain her love. If I didn’t, then I might not have a mother anymore, and it would be all my fault.

I WAS OVER AN HOUR EARLY. I WAS THE ONLY PERSON IN THE ARRIVALS area, except for an employee vacuuming the floors around the check-in counters. At six thirty, the shop lights came on. Then a handful of people joined me at the arrivals gate. A young man holding a bouquet in one hand, yawning into the other. An older couple, clasping hands as they leaned against each other. Several men in dark suits bearing iPads that displayed in large fonts names like “Mr. Volker” and “J. Hudson.”

Seven o’ clock. My mother’s flight must have just touched down. I tried to imagine her disembarking in real time, so I would know how much longer I had to wait: standing up, waiting for the jet bridge to open, queuing at customs, getting her passport stamped, walking through baggage claim. She would be out earlier; she had not checked a bag. A trickle first, then a wave of rumpled travelers, blinking under the bright lights like they’d just emerged from a cave.

“Mom,” I called, waving. “Mom.”

She turned, and weary relief spread across her face. “Lily, hi.”

We hugged. She was bony, birdlike in my arms. She had always been slim, fastidious about her waistline, but this frailty was new. I had been taller than her since I graduated from high school, but I was somehow disturbed, every time I went home for breaks, to discover that I was in every way larger than she was. She wore sweats and a T-shirt, clothes she almost never wore outside the house, and the effect was that she seemed both little-girlish and very old at once.