Page 48 of Taipei Story

I thought about the things we considered normal in America: fire drills, tornado drills, school shooter drills. Shooter drills were the worst, since the advice kept changing. First it was to hide out of sight of the windows. Then it was to barricade the doors. Then it was to escape out the windows. Now it was “run, hide, and fight.” But nothing we did in America approximated preparing for a total war—for the occupation and devastation of our homeland.

“Lily!” It was Teacher Sun; her classroom was just past the computer lab. “Why aren’t you at lunch?”

“I thought there would be an air raid drill,” I said. “I didn’t want to be caught outside.”

“A what?”

I glanced down at the email, just to make sure I had pronounced it correctly. “The air raid drill?”

“The air raid drill!” Teacher Sun laughed. “Was that today?”

“Yes, they sent out an announcement.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that!”

She walked off before I could ask her what she meant. I blinked at my screen. I was so woozy from hunger that the characters swam like squiggles before me, unintelligible. I still didn’t know whether I was allowed to leave the building. The longer I was here, the less I understood about anything at all.

SKIPPER APPROACHED ME IN THE HALLWAY AND SAID, “I HEARD your grandfather passed away.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t spoken to Skipper since before I left for Beitou. “Yes. He did.”

“I am very sorry for your loss.”

He used the same condolence phrase I had learned from Teacher Sun. I was impressed. I had never carried out a full conversation in Chinese with Skipper before. But Tingting was right—his Chinese was very good.

“Were there strippers at the funeral?” Skipper asked.

“What?”

Skipper explained that he had learned from Tingting that sometimes the Taiwanese liked to employ strippers at their funerals—literally, half-naked girls gyrating on top of cars. The point was to attract a big crowd, because sometimes it mattered for Buddhists that a big, raucous crowd see the dead off to the underworld. 熱鬧 was the phrase that Skipper used: hot and noisy.

“I don’t think it was that sort of funeral.” I was trying to decide whether to be offended. “And I don’t think my gonggong would have approved of strippers.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Skipper rubbed at the back of his neck. “Sorry, I guess I was just trying to be funny.”

I felt a sharp pressure behind my eyes. I hugged him before I started crying. Skipper stood stiff in my arms for a moment, and then he lifted one hand and patted me on the back.

FOR MODERN TAIWANESE LITERATURE, I HAD TO WRITE A FIVE-HUNDRED-CHARACTER essay on an experience I’d had with suicide. Of course, I didn’t have to write about my own suicide. Friends or family or even fictional accounts were okay. Suicidal ideation or attempts were also okay—no one needed to have actually died. We just had to practice using the following phrases:

自殺: suicide

尋短見: to seek a short-term solution; euphemistically, commit suicide

愁悶: gloomy, in low spirits

Fortunately, I had plenty of material to work with. Over fifteen minutes, with much help from the dictionary, I typed: “My older sister, Jasmine, was once gloomy and in low spirits, and she tried to seek a short-term solution by ending her own life. Fortunately, she was not successful.”

For the term “successful,” I used 成功: the same phrase I would use in the context of getting good grades or meeting a self-help goal, so that when translated back, the sentence read more like “She did not achieve her ambitions of killing herself.” I wasn’t sure if this was appropriate, but I didn’t know a better phrase.

It had happened several years ago, during what our family now referred to as Jasmine’s “difficult phase.” We used the word “difficult” because neither of my parents had the words or even the conceptual framework for “clinical depression.” It all began when my parents realized that it was past midnight, that the family car was missing, and that no one had heard from Jasmine for hours. My mother and father spoke to some of Jasmine’s friends, and the story emerged in bits and pieces. Jasmine had been threatening to kill herself. Jasmine had left a note with someone, somewhere, though this person was now unreachable, and no one remembered what the note said. Allegedly there were screenshots of incriminating conversations, but we couldn’t see them. Jasmine had asked a friend to procure sleeping pills for her, and though no one did so, they hadn’t thought to warn my parents that Jasmine had made this request. I had always hated Jasmine’s friends: surly, greasy-haired teenagers in dark and baggy clothes, whose lips curled when they saw me, who laughed when I asked if they were in Jasmine’s homeroom class. They were not helpful—if anything, they seemed resentful that we were harshing Jasmine’s vibe, that the least we could give her was the freedom to die.

We searched Jasmine’s room, but she had been careful. Her browser history was wiped clean. Nothing in her drawers. A few empty plastic baggies, wads of cash, but what did that mean? We found only one incriminating item: an empty handle of vodka, tucked indifferently behind the trash can. I remembered that bottle vividly, because it was the first time I understood an object to be vodka, which until then was a concept I had encountered only in Dostoevsky novels. Jasmine had finished a handle of Burnett’s Hot Cinnamon vodka. I understood this was a symbol of vice, and the first time I saw that cheap red-and-white label at a college party, vomit crept up in my throat.

I remembered huddling with Flora around the kitchen table, knees drawn up, arms wrapped over our shins while our father shouted at Jasmine’s friends over the phone. Where did you see her? When was this? Why didn’t you tell us? When he wasn’t on the phone, he was ranting, slamming his palms against the walls.

The police came to our door. At first they thought our mother had called in a domestic violence complaint against our father because she was crying and he was shouting, and they tried to arrest my father, but Flora and I ran in shouting our protests in English, and even when everyone had calmed down, they were unsympathetic. Was Jasmine a minor? No, eighteen? Then they couldn’t do anything. Adults who lived at home were still adults; they had the right not to be found. What about the car? Had Jasmine stolen the car? Yes, they could report the vehicle as stolen, but that was not so urgent as to warrant a house call. They agreed to help only after our father told them that Jasmine was suicidal. I guessed premeditated murder was still a crime even if the victim was the perpetrator.

Gonggong and Popo were in the house. They had come for our winter break, because we hadn’t been to China that summer and my mother missed her parents. It was a tense visit. Flora and I were entering middle school and high school respectively, and we were grappling with the life-or-death stakes of those milieus. We did not have time to babysit our grandparents. Jasmine had decided against college; she was still living at home, but she was never around. I only ever saw her sneaking in late at night and then leaving first thing in the morning.