Page 4 of Taipei Story

John Cahan-Song was famous. We were good at ignoring famous people at Yale. In my residential college alone there lived a former Olympic gymnast, the heiress to an oil dynasty, and a child actress who had recently been killed off on her network show. You could search images of these people on your own time or read their profiles in The Cut, but if you sat across from them in the dining hall, you still had to pretend you didn’t know who they were. Of course, we were hyperaware of them—we always knew who they were, and what they were up to. I knew for instance that JC kept a lavender diffuser in his dorm room, that Luca Guadagnino was his favorite director, and that he walked girls home after they’d had sex, but only if it was after dark.

JC wasn’t famous on his own merits but because of his mother, Lydia Cahan-Song, a professor of linguistics who had risen to fame for a TED Talk followed by a bestselling memoir about how she had raised her children to speak five languages with near-native fluency. She and her husband spoke only English and Chinese, so they had hired two au pairs: one from France and one from Sweden, who between them spoke German, French, and Italian. JC’s older sister, Justine, a first-year in the law school, was notoriously beautiful. The siblings were all over TikTok. They did a recurring bit where they would begin an argument in one language and segue seamlessly to another, going around the world while little flag emojis popped up in the background. I wasn’t inordinately obsessed with the siblings; the algorithm just kept pushing them at me. I would be mindlessly scrolling on my phone, and suddenly there they were. I had watched JC crooning a French lullaby to a bunny rabbit more times than I dared admit.

But even John Cahan-Song had to work on his Chinese! This comforted me. It put us on equal footing. So even the TikTok famous could not munch on grass in the pasture.

THE TOUR WAS LED BY A RECENT COLLEGE GRADUATE NAMED CASSIDY. Cassidy had attended the program for several semesters as a student, and now she was living her dream: helping other people on their journeys through Chinese.

Cassidy told us that National Taiwan University had been built in the 1920s by the Japanese colonial government but was renamed and reestablished as a Chinese institution after Japan’s defeat in World War II. As we walked I tried to work out what made NTU look so distinctly Asian to me. Perhaps it was the lotus pads floating atop the Drunken Moon Lake, or the enormous palm trees ringing the central boulevard. Or the names of the dorms—here they were called things like Women’s Fourth Dorm and Men’s Eighth Dorm, instead of being named after dead slave owners. Or the enormous bike stands on every other block. I had never seen so many bikers on a college campus. They dipped in and out of the spacious bike lanes, texting while riding, riding with no hands.

Cassidy walked us past a noodle stand, a snack shop, and a farm store (NTU’s agricultural department was famed for its cows, and we were encouraged to come try the ice cream sandwiches) and then led us through the student center. This was a good option for lunch, Cassidy told us; the food was very cheap, and not as bad as it looked. There was a bakery, a dumpling kiosk, a bubble tea kiosk, and even a pay-by-weight vegetarian buffet where we could scoop our own bowls of rice out of a massive cooker. There was no air-conditioning, despite the sweltering heat. Enormous box fans hummed from every corner. Taiwanese students sat hunched over the tables, glaring at their textbooks.

Outside, we clustered around a tall metal structure: four poles stretching to the sky, then dipping down to support a bronze bell. This was the Fu Bell, named after one of the university’s former presidents. “President Fu was beloved on campus,” Cassidy told us. “Once, during the martial law period, after a student protest, the government sent officers to raid the campus for Communist sympathizers, and Principal Fu refused to let them through the gates. He said this was a place of learning, not politics. If they injured any students, then he would fight them himself.”

Someone asked Cassidy if there were a lot of Communist sympathizers during the Cold War, and Cassidy blinked at him like he was stupid. “I mean,” she said. “Mainland China’s like, right there.”

I SENT SOME PICTURES OF THE CAMPUS TO MY PARENTS. I WASN’T sure what mood they were in, but they could usually be coaxed out of a bad spell by talking about academia. They’d been so excited when I was accepted to the program. National Taiwan University was apparently very prestigious—it was like the Harvard of Taiwan. My father asked if I had made any connections yet with the students or professors. Not really, I texted back. All of my classmates are exchange students. And the language teachers aren’t full professors, they’re just instructors. This was confusing because in Chinese, you used the same appellation for teachers regardless of whether someone was a tenured professor or a ski instructor: 老師.

My father suggested I sit in on some physics lectures, if I had the time. My mother wanted to know if all the teachers were Taiwanese.

I think so, I wrote.

That’s okay, said my mother. Just don’t pick up a Taiwanese accent.

I asked her what was wrong with a Taiwanese accent. Nothing, she texted. The Taiwanese accent is fine, it is very gentle. A moment passed, and then she wrote, Please don’t lose your Beijing accent.

My college language instructor was a woman from Beijing. Over my freshman year I had slowly adopted her pronunciations, and these had delighted my mother: my pert, crisp syllables, the way I added the er sound randomly at the end of every other word. I gathered that the Beijing accent was like the Queen’s English. It was a little grating, but it signaled that you had class, that you were better than other people.

“You’re starting to sound like Auntie Sharon,” my mother liked to say. This was a compliment. Auntie Sharon was my mother’s best friend from church. Most of my mother’s church friends were Cantonese or Fujianese. Auntie Sharon was the only one from Beijing, and she was widely recognized as a lady with style. After Sunday services, she liked to take me aside and show me photos from her most recent vacation to Europe. She always stood before famous landmarks in the exact same pose: her feet arranged in the ballet third position, her arms lifted daintily at her sides, her thumbs touching her index fingers. Auntie Sharon spoke exclusively in Chinese, except when she switched in the middle of a sentence to use her favorite English phrase: “Not my cup of tea.”

People who were not Auntie Sharon’s cup of tea: the substitute pianist (who dressed too casually), the youth pastor (whose teeth were too white), her son Benji’s new wife (who was from Shanghai, and “fresh off the boat,” and did not treat Auntie Sharon with the appropriate amount of respect).

The Taiwanese accent, by comparison, was famously friendly. I had seen a viral video where an influencer from Beijing was moved to tears on a flight to Taipei because her flight attendant was so sweet. But my mother didn’t want me to adopt this accent. She was afraid that sounding too gentle would set me back in life. She wanted me to learn to sound mean and rich. Then my opportunities would be boundless.

AFTER THE TOUR WE RETURNED TO THE OFFICE TO COLLECT OUR textbooks. We had a choice between reading Traditional or Simplified characters. As I understood it, mainland China used Simplified characters because Chairman Mao, a Communist revolutionary, believed that illiterate peasants could be raised from the shackles of ignorance only by stripping the language of its unnecessary brushstrokes. Meanwhile Hong Kong, Taiwan, and many other diaspora Chinese communities still used Traditional characters, because they refused to erase thousands of years of history and culture, and because they hated the Communists.

I could read both writing systems, so I chose Traditional. I didn’t have a good reason. It just seemed harder, and I had always felt there was some virtue in choosing the harder path, at least when it came to school.

I stepped into the hallway and flipped through each volume. New textbooks always gave me a little masochistic thrill. I liked the weight of them. I liked previewing all the things I didn’t know. It made me excited about the amount of work to be done—the hours I would spend throwing my mind at these walls of text, breaking them down to comprehension. It felt like a promise. By the time we were finished here, I would be able to read everything in these books. All that weight would go inside my head.

THAT NIGHT IN OUR APARTMENT, ANNA AND I SPOKE ONLY IN CHINESE to each other. We had decided that we should obey the language pledge even when we were at home for a fully immersive experience. If we didn’t remember the term for “shower” or “laundry machine,” then we would have to look it up, and this would force us to build our vocabularies over time.

After an hour of this, I wanted to smack her. It wasn’t anything Anna said but the way she said it—delicate, mincing, somehow both naive and passive-aggressive at once. She pitched everything at least an octave higher in Chinese, and it actually hurt my ears. I had never felt this way about her in class. But when we weren’t role-playing or reading from a textbook, when she was just being herself, I couldn’t stand her. In Chinese, Anna was a pouty baby.

How could I broach this without being an asshole? I tried: “You know, your personality in Chinese is different.”

Anna frowned. I knew she wanted to say, How so? But she didn’t know how to phrase that, so what came out was “What are you saying?”

I wanted to respond You sound like a spoiled brat and your voice gives me a headache. But I didn’t know any of those words, so I said, “You’re like a little child. Your voice—it is higher.”

“You’re different too,” said Anna. “You become . . .” She reached for her phone. She typed something into her dictionary app, then announced, “Docile and uncertain.”

We both fell quiet. Was she also thinking of her parents?

WE HAD A LONG WEEKEND OFF BEFORE CLASSES BEGAN THE NEXT Tuesday. A group chat of Yalies had materialized: me and Anna, Skipper, two other students from our freshman year section—Devin and Belinda—and JC. None of us had been to Taipei before, but we had all received the same travel advice, and we were agreed on what we had to do first: explore the monuments at Liberty Square, go to the National Palace Museum, eat at a night market, and take the elevator to the top of Taipei 101. Some of our tips sounded like fairy-tale quests. At sunset, walk to the base of Elephant Mountain, look for the shop with the red lanterns, and find the vegan beef noodle soup made with monkey’s head mushroom. But these were well-trod paths. Without fail, the vegan noodle soup did appear.

There emerged a pecking order of cultural authority that had something to do with language placement level but more to do with assumptions about race: At the bottom were Devin and Skipper, who were white; then Belinda, who was Chinese but adopted; then JC, whose accent was suspiciously bad, though he should have been a native speaker. Anna and I were at the top. Neither of us had ever been here, but we had been on family trips to the mainland, and that was supposed to be close enough. This meant we called the shots: We interpreted when the others couldn’t understand; we decided which train lines to take and which restaurants to eat at; and we explained the local customs to others, although most of the time we were just relaying Google search results. Sometimes I would sneak to the bathroom just to look something up on my phone—I liked having all the answers.

We made a pilgrimage to the original Din Tai Fung, the soup dumpling empire that now had branch locations across the world. We showed up beneath the distinctive red neon characters at six, which we thought was early for dinner, and found a line curling around the block. But we didn’t wait long—the place was enormous. The little storefront concealed an underground labyrinth stretching across two floors, and as we were led to our seats, we passed glass walls through which we could watch chefs wrapping those famously precise soup dumplings: eighteen folds, twenty-one grams each.