Page 44 of Taipei Story

“He was watching me.

“Taking care of me.

“He always took care of me.”

“I see,” said my mother.

A Zhu said something to my mother, who said to me, “Lily, I think Popo needs to rest now.”

I pretended not to be relieved. “Okay.”

“Say goodbye.” A Zhu lifted Popo’s hand and made it wave. “Goodbye, Li-Li! We’ll talk again soon!”

“Popo, 我想你,” I said. Literally, I’m thinking of you, “I” + “think” + “you”, but in Chinese it meant more. 想 had so many glosses. I miss you, I want you, I desire you, I wish you were here. “Popo, I miss you very much.”

She continued staring off into space as if she hadn’t heard.

A Zhu handed the phone to my mother. My mother turned the camera onto her own face as she walked into another room. There were shadows under her eyes. The gray around her temples seemed more pronounced than before. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Popo knows who you are, she’s just very confused these days.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “How is she doing?”

“She keeps asking where he is.”

“Did you tell her he passed away?”

“Yes. Many times.”

“Do you think it’s going to register at some point?”

“I don’t know.” My mother shook her head. “Honestly, I think we should stop reminding her. I’m scared she’ll decide not to wake up.”

ON MONDAY, I HAD A MELTDOWN IN THOUGHT AND SOCIETY.

The material that day was not so difficult. Our reading was about whether Taiwanese voters should have the right to recall corrupt officials through a special process. I had studied the vocabulary list the night before and felt fine about it: political party, vote, right, authority. All easy, recognizable characters. But that was just the problem. They were easy characters because they were abstract and had a million different uses, and this made it hard for me to speak in the particular about them.

I was meant to come up with a sentence about the obligations of elected officials to their constituents. I knew the relevant words, but I didn’t know how to slot them into a sentence. I threw all the constructions I knew around it until it came out convoluted and stupid, a winding clause that I didn’t know how to close.

“So the citizens, because they want to have the ability to interrogate the officials, they are inclined to . . .” I halted. My mind was totally blank—I knew neither what I wanted to say nor how to say it. “They . . .”

Teacher Cai watched me, waiting. I wished she would move on, but that wasn’t how she ran the class. She always let a silence stretch. It wasn’t cruel. It was good pedagogy, part of the program’s philosophical approach. Many heritage speakers arrested their language ability at a novice level because they skirted away from difficult constructions in everyday conversation. We didn’t like awkward pauses, we didn’t like to struggle with our speech, and so we remained in the safe, easy territory of the subject-verb-object. I eat an apple. I do homework. But to push ourselves to speak in more complex clauses, we had to muck around with the long, frustrating silences. So no one else in the class found it strange, or even uncomfortable, that I couldn’t get the sentence out. This happened all the time.

Teacher Cai prodded. “The citizens are inclined to what?”

I had never felt this blankness before. I was used to being so quick. I always knew the answer. Meaning was supposed to flow easily for me because I was such a good student. But the words would not come. It was not like my second week of class, when I had halted often because my brain was forming new connections and erasing bad habits. A wall was thrown up in my mind. I was totally outside language, beyond communication.

I don’t know, I tried to say. But I opened my mouth and found that I didn’t have the words for that either.

The silence stretched. Teacher Cai cocked her head. I felt no malice from her. This wasn’t punitive. She was deciding how much more I could take. But finally she must have seen there was no hope here, because she turned to Shanhong, and didn’t call on me again for the rest of class.

The Singaporeans kept their eyes fixed down at their notebooks. Shanhong tossed me a sympathetic smile.

When class was over, I went up to Teacher Cai’s desk. I had to apologize for this rupture. I wanted her to know I still liked her, that I was trying hard—that I was the good immigrant daughter she expected me to be.

But how could I explain this choking feeling? It was all just so beside the point. I could not speak Chinese and it was clear by now I was never going to learn. I would always be straining for words, yanking my tongue back from incorrect tones, and it didn’t matter anyway because my Chinese was not good for anything, I did not live here and I would never live here, and I didn’t have family here, and it didn’t matter whether I could converse fluently about mayoral politics in Taipei because I couldn’t vote here, and Taipei had nothing to do with me, so who were we fooling? What was this all for?

What I said was “I’m very sorry, teacher. It won’t happen again.”

Teacher Cai gave me a wary glance. She still thought this was a problem of attendance—that I was a slutty delinquent. “Just review your vocabulary list next time,” she said. “It’s not good to miss so much class, okay?”