Page 41 of Taipei Story

“It’s just something we learned. Sorry, Mom—it’s just a quote.”

She shook her head, and it seemed she was talking to the air more than to me. “But why do they teach that?”

WE TOOK THE ESCALATOR UP TO YET ANOTHER FOOD HALL. MY mother kept asking me if I was hungry. This was an olive branch: I had been forgiven. She read things off menus like they were rare, astonishing delicacies. Did I want salted duck congee? Hainan chicken rice?

I did consider it every time she asked, because eating would be a nice way to pass the time. A meal gave you structure. You considered the menu, you ordered your food, the food came, you picked your way through it, and then you paid the bill. All together this could take up to an hour, if we really dragged our feet. Each time she asked, I imagined putting food in my mouth, and my stomach roiled. No, I told her; I wasn’t in the mood, not yet.

We kept wandering. The arrivals lounge had seemed so enormous when I first arrived; all the storefronts bursting with possibility, goodies from another world. But now I had been inside the city, and it was clear these stores were just holding areas, facsimiles of real life to occupy your attention until you could move on.

I had stopped checking the time. This was my world now. I had lived in Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport forever. The seconds slowed to a trickle, and I had resigned myself to this liminal space, this hollowed-out feeling of having nothing to look forward to, but nothing to move on from. This felt purifying. Penance for not feeling the right kind of grief. I had to step out of time, outside routine and expectation, and see what that felt like. There was no shape to the day, only the silence, and its weight.

We walked with no direction. We turned down hallways just to see where they led. We rode the elevator to the other side of the gift concourse. “You can’t get to security from here,” a guard told us. He asked what we were up to, and my mother said we were just walking around. He asked to see her boarding pass. Then he told us we had to go back to the main lounge, even though the gift concourse was clearly open to the public. I wanted to argue, but my mother said it was okay. She hadn’t found anything she wanted to buy.

WE DECIDED TO GO UP TO THE FIFTH-FLOOR VIEWING PLATFORM. We had seen several signs indicating its existence, though it was harder than expected to find. We couldn’t get there from the third or fourth floors. We had to go around the back of the first floor and take a series of escalators, then walk through a series of doors that seemed like they were off-limits but weren’t. At last we emerged onto a large balcony facing the landing strips.

Five people were already up there. They were all men. They didn’t seem to know one another. They were sitting on different benches, and they wore different kinds of clothes. One man wore a full suit and sunglasses. One was dressed in what looked like a maintenance uniform and was curled up asleep on his bench. None of them so much as glanced our way. They just kept gazing at the airfield.

I wondered who they were. This seemed like a weird place to wait for a flight, so far from the food halls and security gates. Maybe they were commuters. Maybe they went to Tokyo every week and came home on the weekends; maybe they knew the schedule by heart and knew down to the minute when they had to go downstairs. Maybe they weren’t flying at all. This seemed more likely—none of them had luggage. One of them, the young man smoking by the balcony, wasn’t even wearing a shirt. Maybe they all worked at the airport in different capacities. Maybe they were on break. Maybe they just liked planes.

One of the men held a black camera with a lens nearly a foot long, and every time a plane rushed down the runway he raised it and clicked the shutter a dozen times until the plane was cleanly in the air.

I looked over at my mother. She had put on her sunglasses. She sat with her arms folded in her lap, her feet crossed at the ankles. She was perfectly still, her mouth relaxed. For once, I felt no pressure to fill the silence. No questions, no platitudes: just the occasional click of the camera and the rising and falling roars from the airfield. We sat there for a long time, watching the planes take off.

5

Courtesy of the author

When I was a child I learned a mental trick by which I could reduce bad things to abstractions. It didn’t matter if my sister was threatening to hang herself, or if my father was threatening to hang himself, or if everyone was screaming and smashing things downstairs. I determined that none of it could affect me. It had nothing to do with me, and I couldn’t do anything about it anyway, and so it wasn’t real. So as long as I locked my door and put on my headphones, I could make the rest of the house melt away and pretend nothing else existed, that the muffled thumps from below were hallucinations, and that the entire world was limited to the things inside my bedroom: my bed, my desk, and my books. I would stay there until the danger had passed. In college I was assigned to read passages from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and I learned that this mindset was called Stoicism. You couldn’t control external events, but you could control your reactions to them. Things hurt you only as much as you let them.

It was important to maintain perspective. Loss was bad because your world was missing something, correct? Okay—so I took a tally of what I’d lost. Gonggong was gone. My mother was in mourning. That was unfortunate. But nothing substantive was missing from my life. I had not seen my gonggong much for the past few years. I had not planned to see him much in the future. During the vast majority of my days, he did not cross my mind, and wasn’t it irrational to mourn a relationship I didn’t have? What I had lost, really, was the occasional video call that I dreaded to begin with. So while his death was real, objectively speaking, there was a subjective sense in which his death did not figure in my life in any significant way. And so if I focused hard enough, perhaps I would not have to go through the grieving process. Perhaps I could pretend that this hadn’t happened and go back to focusing on my classes.

But when I woke up the next morning I still felt that terrible weight across my body, and it still hurt to breathe.

I thought about skipping class and staying home for the third day in a row. I weighed the two options in my head: the discomfort of sitting for hours in the department, or the discomfort of sitting at home alone. But then I received an email saying I was wanted urgently in the program office. That did it. Above all else, I hated disappointing the authorities.

“Hi, Lily.” Teacher Xu—the program director—was waiting for me in the office. I knew then that I was in serious trouble. “How are you doing?”

She gestured at the chair across from her, so I sat down. “I’m okay.”

“And how do you feel about the program so far?”

“Pretty good, I guess.” It was hard to look her in the eyes. “I like all my classes.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” Teacher Xu leaned forward. “Your teachers say that you’re making good progress, and that you are typically well prepared and active in class. However, I’d like to remind you about our program’s attendance policy. So far you have missed three days, without once communicating with the office. This is unacceptable, Lily. First, it is disrespectful to your teachers. Second, if you miss any more classes, then you risk failing the program.”

“I understand.”

So they had had faculty meetings about me. They had discussed whether I was a good student or not, and if not, then what should be done with me. This had never happened to me before. My best quality was being unobtrusive. I had never posed a problem to anyone, for any reason.

“I know it is very exciting to be in a new city for the first time,” said Teacher Xu. “You’re away from home, you have a lot of freedom, and there are many fun opportunities. You may, for instance, wish to go on day trips with your classmates. But I urge you to contain those trips to the weekends. You are here on a government grant, correct? Those grants are to support your studies. They are not meant for . . . resorts.”

So the rumors about Beitou had reached Teacher Xu too. I was horrified. I needed her to understand that I was not this person she imagined. I was a good, diligent Chinese girl; I did all my homework, I showed up to class, I did not break the rules, and I did not go to hot springs resorts to do vile things with the other gender.

But I had missed all those classes. I had gone to Beitou with JC and I had been naked in that tub and I had drunk all that whisky at the bar with Andrew. I had become this person in Taipei: a bad girl who did not prioritize her studies.

“I’m very sorry I missed class yesterday,” I said. “My grandfather passed away.”

“Ah.” Teacher Xu’s expression softened. “I see. That’s—I’m sorry to hear it. So you went to his funeral?”