Page 45 of Taipei Story

STOICISM, I REMINDED MYSELF. STOICISM.

My gonggong was gone and I hated Taipei and I did not have any friends but none of this had to bother me because I wasn’t here to feel happy, I was here to get an education, my university had paid for me to be here, and this was what I would focus on for the next few weeks: keeping my head down and doing my homework. Take refuge in the back roads of the self, said Marcus Aurelius. Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.

It didn’t work.

I wasn’t resilient enough. It didn’t matter that nothing had functionally changed about my days. It still felt like the bottom had dropped out from my world, and I couldn’t get the taste of ash out of my mouth, and when I looked at my textbooks I felt no interest in applying myself to their contents, because I couldn’t see the point of doing anything at all. All I could think about was that my gonggong wasn’t alive anymore, and I didn’t even have memories to treasure, and that was entirely my fault.

WHEN I GOT HOME FROM THE DEPARTMENT, MY KNEES BUCKLED, and I was crying before I hit the floor.

I simply could not stop crying these days. I cried every evening before bed. I cried at random intervals during the day. I cried a bit in the mornings before I left for the department. It was not the frequency that surprised me but the sudden onslaught of these crying fits. There was no warning; a sniffle would escalate to full-blown sobs in a matter of seconds. It didn’t matter what I’d been doing or what I’d been thinking about. I had no choice in the matter. I could just be working on my homework or walking home from the bus stop, and then I would remember that Gonggong was dead, and my thoughts would follow the same stupid patterns. No, he was not dead. How could he be dead? But he was indeed dead, and this was irreversible. I would never see him again, and nothing I did could change this. I would reflect on these basic facts, and then tears would start pooling in my eyes.

I knew I couldn’t do anything to stop it. If anything, I’d gained an appreciation for the inevitability of the process. I was familiar now with all the stages: The beginning, when my eyes got very hot and raw under my skin and it felt like a tap had been turned on behind my nose. The buildup, the hiccups and the short, desperate breaths. The peak, the painful part, when my sobbing approached a seizure and I couldn’t breathe and my ribs really hurt. I always ended up on the floor because it strained my core to sit up. I could not remember crying this hard in my life. I had never felt all this pressure inside me with nowhere to go. At this point the crying became independent of anything I was thinking or feeling, and my mind drifted aloof while my body went through round after round of involuntary spasms. I was fascinated by the phonemes of my cries—the way my sobs nearly formed intelligible syllables but fell just short.

What was the linguistic function of my crying? If babies cried to get attention, then why did adults cry when they were alone? What was I trying to communicate, and to whom?

Eventually my sobs subsided, but then my sinuses clogged up, and there was always a brief panic when I couldn’t get air. I was a disgusting crier. Something leaked from every orifice: tears, snot, phlegm. I couldn’t breathe through my nose anymore; I had to suck in air through my mouth and then blow out into a tissue. At first my sinuses were so clogged that the blowing only gave me a headache. Sometimes my ears popped. But if I persisted in blowing, then snot would start coming out in huge, satisfying clots, and then my airways would open up.

After, a light and empty feeling. I sat still, just breathing. I felt hollowed out. Like a spoon had dug out everything wet and dirty inside me and now I was empty, dazed, clean.

This wasn’t a bad feeling. Perhaps this was one of the functions of crying: to purge the capacity for grief, even just for a little. It was the only time when I didn’t feel that weight on my chest. I didn’t feel good, but I didn’t feel anything. At least, for a few minutes after, I didn’t feel bad.

A FEW DAYS LATER, MY MOTHER SENT ME A VIDEO OF POPO.

She looked so pained to be in front of the camera. Her face was strained in a rictus of discomfort. I could never determine with old people whether they were in active pain, or if their faces were stretched that way even when they were at peace. But it really didn’t seem like Popo was enjoying herself.

I hit play on the video. Popo sat, staring into space. Then my mother’s voice: “Popo! Popo. Say hi to Li-Li. Tell Li-Li you love her.”

“Li-Li, ah.” Popo’s expression did not change. If anything, the downward tug of her mouth grew more severe. She repeated, with no inflection, “Hello, Li-Li, I love you.”

This was something Popo would never say, because Popo didn’t speak like that. Popo asked about how we were doing in school, she mentioned if we had gotten taller, and she reminded us to eat well and exercise. That was how Popo expressed her love. She was talking like this only because my mother was coaching her from behind the camera to say the precise words my mother thought I wanted to hear. Still I saved the video and played it over and over again until I fell asleep.

I MISSED ANNA.

I was still angry with her for all the same reasons, but I hadn’t known how I would crave her physical presence. I wished she would fill up her corner of the apartment again, grease stains and all. I missed falling asleep to the sound of her soft, even breathing. I missed her little piglet snores. Her snores weren’t annoying so much as they were absurd—cute, tiny grunts that always began around two or three in the morning. Sometimes they woke me up, but I wasn’t upset about it. Anna was so self-conscious about her snoring, even when asleep. If I cleared my throat, or even shifted in bed, the snoring always stopped.

But now the apartment was silent, and there was nothing so frightening as the nights when sleep wouldn’t come and the dark was as vast as my imagination—when I had to fill the void with everything I had ever done wrong.

I ASKED MY MOTHER IF WE COULD TALK ON THE PHONE ABOUT OUR family’s history. She asked me where I wanted to start.

“What are their names?” I asked.

I didn’t know the proper names of any of my extended family. I had no reason to know them—we had never used them. To me, my relatives were just Gonggong, Yeye, Nainai, Popo, Dayi, Eryi, and so on. Most Chinese households were like this—you referred to people by their relation to you. You didn’t even have to distinguish between this aunt or that aunt by name; you just called them First Aunt and Second Aunt, depending on seniority. Dayi, Eryi. Then Dayizhang and Eryizhang for their husbands, and so on. But this was so embarrassing. I couldn’t look anyone up in a registry. I couldn’t even find their obituaries.

My mother recited the names of everyone in her immediate family. I repeated each one as she said it, but they slid out of my mind as we went along. I asked her if she would text me a list so I could see which characters were involved, and she promised me she would.

I wanted to document everything about everyone. What year were they born? Where did they go to school? When did they start their first jobs? When did they move to Guangzhou? I couldn’t believe I had never bothered to ask about these things before. Did other people know these things about their grandparents? Was I the only one who’d been living in a fog?

My mother said she didn’t know all the answers off the top of her head, but that she could send them to me later, if it mattered that much. “What else do you want to know?”

Everything. I didn’t have the barest contours of the story, let alone a line of questioning. “We could start at the beginning, I guess. So Gonggong—has his family always been in Guangzhou?”

“Actually, no,” said my mother. “He grew up in Cambodia.”

“Cambodia?”

“Right, yes.”

“So he’s actually Cambodian?”