Page 42 of Taipei Story

“No, the funeral is in Guangzhou. It’s today, actually. My family is in Guangzhou. But my mom, she . . .” I didn’t know how to say “layover.” I struggled for a moment, and that made every next word a battle to pronounce, and then all I managed to get out was some gibberish to the effect of “She came here first, and then I went and saw her, and then she went to Guangzhou.”

“I understand.” I couldn’t tell if Teacher Xu believed or understood me, but she didn’t react the way I had hoped. “That is very sad to hear, of course. But that is still an unexcused absence.”

I WAS DISCOVERING THAT ONE COULD NOT GET A LOT OF EMOTIONAL capital trading upon a grandparent’s death. My other teachers reacted the same way when I told them why I’d missed class: They said they were sorry, and then they reminded me of my overdue homework. I was disappointed, and guilty about feeling disappointed. I had really thought everyone would be nicer to me, all things considered.

I got the sense that grandparents did not count. Siblings counted. Parents counted. They were present in your life in ways that mattered. You could get tons of sympathy by telling people your mother or father had died. But it was no surprise when a grandparent died. Grandparents were defined by their declining health, by their dementia and hip-replacement surgeries and chemotherapy. Your whole childhood was preparation for your grandparents dying. Parents died, and people understood if this wrecked you for a year, for many years. Grandparents died, and it was very sad, but that was just part of growing up. You were supposed to walk it off.

IN MODERN TAIWANESE LITERATURE, WE WERE ON A GOOD RUN with stories about death.

We had just finished reading an experimentalist science fiction short story by an author named Chuan Beimu. I had to read it a few times to understand what was happening. The main character’s father has recently passed away, but the main character keeps seeing him pop up on street view in Google Maps. Eventually he is able to confront his father’s ghost, who reveals that Google hires ghosts of the recently deceased to photograph distant locations for its navigation apps. In death, his father gets to go exploring like he never did in life. All this makes the main character feel better about his father’s passing. He’s not really gone, after all; he’s just exploring the North Pole.

Shuya wanted to know if Google had sponsored the story, and Teacher Lin said that she didn’t know.

Teacher Lin asked us if any of us had lost family members or had stories we wanted to share about grief. We sat silent for a moment.

“Of course, Lily’s grandfather recently passed away,” said Teacher Lin.

I said I didn’t have anything interesting to say about it, and Teacher Lin didn’t press.

Meijuan offered, “My father died a few years ago.”

A parent was a big deal. We all made some noises of sympathy.

Meijuan went on. This had happened back in Myanmar, during the height of the pandemic. Meijuan’s whole family had come down with Covid at the same time. She and her siblings had fairly mild cases, but their parents’ fevers weren’t breaking, and their oxygen levels were low. She and her sister had planned to take their parents to the hospital. It was hard back then to secure hospital admission, but they had made some calls, and a friend knew a friend, and so on. They had a car booked and everything. That morning, while she and her sister were eating breakfast, their father called out and asked for a sponge bath. “At first we ignored him,” she said. “I mean, we were tired too, and we were in the middle of breakfast. So we finished eating first, and then we went to go wipe him down. He was covered in sweat. He was really struggling. But he’d been like that for a while, so I thought we still had time. But then when I was patting his neck I noticed he wasn’t breathing. And I realized he’d just died. In my arms. Just like that.” She made a gesture with her hands to show us how she had held him: like she was a groom and her father’s corpse was her bride.

None of us said anything, so Meijuan went on. The real nightmare was scheduling his funeral during lockdown. No one could travel. Her younger brother, the only one who didn’t have Covid, had to go out and oversee the cremation. All the funeral homes would turn you away if the cause of death was Covid, so he’d lied and said their father had died of a stroke.

“Why did he have to oversee the cremation?” Shuya asked.

“To make sure the body is burned properly,” said Meijuan. “Otherwise they might just throw it away, or even sell it on the black market.”

“Does that happen a lot?” I asked.

“Does it have to do with the organ trade?” Shuya asked.

“I don’t know,” said Meijuan. “But better safe than sorry.”

“Was it hard to watch?” Teacher Lin asked.

“I don’t know,” Meijuan said again. “My brother didn’t say. He was very quiet when he came home, but then we never spoke of it again.”

I thought of another friend, from India, whose father had recently passed. In her village, it was traditional for the family to witness the body as it burned. I too had asked her if it was difficult to watch her father transformed to ash, and she’d said no; actually, it was cathartic, it let her recognize this earthly husk wasn’t her father anymore, that her father’s soul had gone somewhere else. I recounted all this out loud, because I wanted to practice talking about “grief” and “catharsis.” But I got stuck trying to explain what I meant by “catharsis,” and my dictionary app seemed not to recognize the word. Teacher Lin didn’t understand what I wanted to express either, so we had to settle for the phrase for “release,” which could also be glossed as “liberation.” Shuya asked Meijuan if her brother might have felt this kind of liberation.

“Yes, maybe,” said Meijuan. “My brother didn’t actually watch the body burning, though. He just saw it go into the chute.”

Teacher Lin told Meijuan she was very sorry for her loss.

“It’s all right,” said Meijuan, although her eyes were red. “It’s been a few years.”

There were still fifteen minutes left in class, but none of us knew what to say. I had nothing to offer regarding Gonggong’s death. I hadn’t been there; I couldn’t supply details such as he had just asked for a sponge bath. I composed a sentence in my head, but I couldn’t speak it out loud, it sounded so stupid. He fell. 倒. Dǎo. Such a generic word. I didn’t have the words for the gritty, material reality of what had happened: a fragile frame, a railing that wasn’t there. Anything could dǎo to the floor. A stack of laundry. Water from a cup. A toddler learning to walk. Things toppled over all the time, and it was just too bad that my gonggong died from it.

Shuya told us that his parents and grandparents were still alive, so unfortunately he had nothing to contribute. He showed us a picture from a recent family gathering. We congratulated him on his good fortune.

“My husband’s sister’s husband died a few years ago,” said Teacher Lin. “He had cancer. It was very sad, because he had two small children, and they had to explain to them how Daddy wasn’t going to be around anymore. They took lots of photos of him before he died. It was fascinating, actually—they had him pose in various positions so they could Photoshop him into important events later. Graduations, weddings, that sort of thing. A digital solution to grief. Sort of like in the story.” She showed us a photo on her phone. “See, here he is, in last year’s Christmas card. You can’t even tell he’s not really there.”

She passed the phone around. We took turns admiring the photo and agreed: The Photoshop had been very good.

Teacher Lin said that next week’s story was about the author’s sister’s suicide, and it was a bit graphic, so we could skip it if we wanted. She apologized that we had been reading so much dreary stuff lately. We told her it was okay. We were tough. Also, we wanted to learn all the relevant vocabulary around suicide. That was the whole point of these elective courses. You learned all sorts of phrases to do with the texture of life. It was important to learn terms like “clinical depression” and “coal burner.” You never knew what might come up one day.