Page 43 of Taipei Story

“LILY, HI!” TEACHER SUN WAS TYPING SOMETHING ON HER KEYBOARD when I entered the classroom. “I see you took some leave this week?”

“My grandfather died,” I said. I had had more practice uttering this by now, and this time it rolled smoothly off my tongue. “I had to go meet my mother at the airport.”

“Oh, Lily.” Teacher Sun’s expression softened. “I am so sorry. But you should really say that he passed away.” She typed the correct characters on the screen for me to see. 去世: literally, “to depart from the world.” She put a big X next to the term that I had used: 死掉. “Passing away is much more dignified,” she explained. “Dying is for animals.”

She must have noticed my stricken face, because she didn’t make me go through that week’s vocabulary. Instead we went over some formal condolences that I could say at Chinese funerals, if ever the occasion came up.

節哀順變: Restrain your grief, and obey change.

節哀保重: Restrain your grief and take care of yourself.

請節哀: Please restrain your grief.

“These are all very formal, elegant sayings,” said Teacher Sun. “You can say these to the bereaved, and people will be really impressed!”

None of these seemed appropriate to text my mother. I asked Teacher Sun if there were any phrases that didn’t have to do with restraint.

“No, no, it’s actually very comforting,” she said. “I guess it sounds kind of bossy in translation. But it’s a kind expression. It shows your concern.”

FUNERAL WENT WELL, MY MOTHER TEXTED IN THE FAMILY GROUP chat. Grandpa was very well respected.

She did not elaborate further or send any pictures. My father reacted with a thumbs-up.

WHEN I GOT HOME FROM THE DEPARTMENT I SHRUGGED OFF MY backpack and crawled to the floor. I lay flat on my back and stared at the ceiling for a while, pondering my circumstances. I had five weeks left in Taipei: an eternity. There were so many events still on the syllabus. Weekly quizzes. Four more Thought and Society essays, four more speeches, five more texts each in Modern Taiwanese Literature and Considering the News. Final exams, a final presentation. A graduation ceremony. These did not seem like real events. They seemed like insurmountable speed bumps on a tar pit of time. To get to the finish I would have to do all these things, and I could not do all these things because I could not even stand up.

I wanted so badly to go home. All those differences I had thought myself acclimated to now seemed unbearable—the heat, the rain, the tight alleys, the mosquitoes. I wanted to see a parking lot. I wanted to see a movie without subtitles. I wanted to eat pizza—not a “fruit pizza” topped with dragon fruit and strawberries, a real pizza, with a thin charred crust and salty tomato sauce. More than anything I wanted to be in my own room, under my comforter, burying my face in my quilted baby pillowcase that had been rubbed so thin that it couldn’t be machine-washed. I wanted to sit with my homework sprawled over the dining room table instead of always hunching over this narrow coffee table with my elbows on my knees, and when I thought about how much time I still had to spend here in this place that was not my home, I felt the blind panic of a child lost at a supermarket.

I clicked around the airline website, and when I saw it would in fact save money to switch my flight to an earlier return date, I felt a brief, delirious wash of relief.

But how would I explain my decision to quit? I would not get academic credit for the program. I might have to pay all my scholarship money back, and if I left the program I was fairly certain I would never receive funding to return. And then I would have failed at the one thing I was good for: studying hard and getting good grades.

MY MOTHER ASKED IF I WANTED TO TALK TO POPO OVER WECHAT. When the call connected, I saw the three of them on a couch in the living room, as if they were posing for a picture: Popo in the middle, with my mother and A Zhu, Popo’s health aide, sitting on either side of her. “Hi, Li-Li!” said A Zhu. A Zhu was Fujianese. I could just barely make out everything A Zhu said, because she spoke Mandarin with my family, but she pronounced words like she wished they were something else.

“Hello, Popo, how are you?” Sloppy words, the wrong words, but I said them anyway. I found myself waving and putting on a high-pitched and cheery affectation, the way I would have spoken when I was a child. “I’m in Taipei now, working on my Chinese. I miss you.”

Popo didn’t react at all when I spoke. I wasn’t sure that she heard anything I said. Even when A Zhu shouted my words into Popo’s ear, she still didn’t react. A long moment passed, and then Popo mumbled something that I couldn’t make out. A Zhu repeated whatever it was to my mother, who said, “It’s Li-Li. Li-Li, remember?”

Popo stared down at her knees.

My mother said, louder, “Li-Li, your granddaughter. My daughter. Number two, remember?”

Popo made a noise that sounded like ungh, which could have been assent, or just discomfort. I wondered when, and how, we could end this call.

“Li-Li has some questions for you,” said my mother. “She wants to know more about your life, isn’t that fun?”

Popo made that sound again. Everyone seemed to take this as a yes.

“Go on,” my mother told me. “What do you want to ask her?”

Everything. Everything was a shameful blank to me. I wanted to know about Popo’s childhood, her family, what kind of background she had come from. What the war—the wars—had been like for her. How she and Gonggong had met, and what it was like building a family during the upheavals of Communist rule—the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, the death of Mao. But I couldn’t tell how much Popo could handle. So I just asked, “How did you meet Gonggong?”

That same cycle again: A Zhu shouting my words back, then my mother, and then finally a glimmer of life from Popo.

She didn’t give her answer all at once. Popo seemed to have lost the ability to speak in full sentences. Instead she uttered phrases, sometimes linked together, sometimes disjointed thoughts. After several painstaking minutes, what I made out was this:

“He was older, and I was younger.

“At first, all he did was watch. Me.