Page 5 of Taipei Story

We nodded intently as our waitress taught us the ideal way to enjoy a soup dumpling: We were to taste it first without any sauces, savoring its natural flavors, then dip it in a mixture of three parts vinegar, one part soy sauce. We ordered one basket of every kind of dumpling. We treated each bite with orgasmic reverence, moaning when we bit the tops off and the broth exploded into our mouths. “Holy fuck,” said the woman at the next table over, in English. She said this at regular intervals, every time she tried another dish. “Holy fuck!” JC wanted to know how they got all that soup inside the dumpling, and at least three of us shouted the response, because we had seen it in a video, an article, a documentary—it’s a jelly when they wrap it; they chill the broth with gelatin powder until it’s solid, and then it melts again when it’s steamed.

We got our bill, and we laughed at the total. We paid less than the equivalent of twenty US dollars per person. This same meal at the New York location would have cost us hundreds. We felt giddy; we thought we’d been let in on a wonderful secret. Was there a superior soup dumpling, somewhere, in a lesser-known dive? Who cared?

AT THE NATIONAL PALACE MUSEUM, WE HEADED STRAIGHT FOR the centerpiece exhibits: the Jadeite Cabbage and the Meat-Shaped Stone. These were exactly what they sounded like: a piece of green-and-white jadeite carved to look like a napa cabbage and a piece of layered-brown jasper carved to look like a cube of pork belly, a thick slab of jellied fat over stringy meat. Clearly everyone knew to see these exhibits first; dozens of visitors were lined up around the hall, and we all waited patiently so that one by one we could take pictures making peace signs against the glass. The Jadeite Cabbage was too shiny to pass off as a real cabbage, but the Meat-Shaped Stone was scarily convincing. I could just feel the squish of fat between my teeth.

Anna had learned that next door was a restaurant where we could order dishes that looked like the statues that looked like the dishes. We pondered whether to go for lunch, but there was another long line outside the front, and it seemed like a lot of trouble just for some cabbage.

In the lobby, a tour guide shepherded a group of Americans toward the ticket booths. “When the Nationalists were losing the Chinese Civil War, they packed some of their best artifacts in crates and had them shipped to Taiwan,” said the guide. “The idea was that as long as they held claim to the nation’s cultural heritage, they retained legitimate claim to power. Of course, that’s silly, but many still believe that though the Communists might rule the mainland, China’s soul lives here. After the Cold War, and especially after the Cultural Revolution, many mainlanders would come to Taiwan to visit the culture that they had lost.”

So it wasn’t just me; so everyone was here to seek a bit of the motherland.

WE WANDERED INTO AN ENORMOUS SHOPPING COMPLEX WHERE we found Eslite, Taiwan’s largest bookstore, open twenty-four/seven and spanning eight floors, where you could buy anything from a desk lamp (level B1) to an aromatherapy kit (level 5F). Our Chinese was not yet good enough to make sense of the book titles. We lingered a bit in the Foreign Languages section, but without much interest; it felt silly to buy Anglophone books in Taiwan. Most of the books were shrink-wrapped, anyhow; this way we could not read them without buying them. We purchased stationery instead: erasers shaped like bunnies, notebooks shaped like hamburgers, and gel pens with pom-poms with silver bells that tinkled when you wrote.

There were pocket almanacs at the checkout counter that told fortunes according to the lunar calendar. We riffled through to June. Today was good for asking for blessings, tailoring, starting a business, and raising beams. Today was bad for dismantling altars, putting on mourning clothes, and the maiden voyage of a boat.

SKIPPER BOUGHT A COTTON SMOCK FROM A VENDOR ON THE street. The vendor told him that this smock had been designed by his daughter, who was studying fashion design in Paris. It was the same fabric used by luxury brands—Gucci, Prada, they all sourced this fabric from the same factory. It would get softer with every wash and keep him cool all day long. Skipper put it on, and for the rest of the day we called him White Jesus.

WE MADE OUR WAY TO THE NINGXIA NIGHT MARKET WHEN THE sun had set and it was cool enough to bear the thought of eating outside. We decided we would walk through the stalls and peruse everything on display before we made our purchases. We were trying to be judicious—we didn’t want to buy the first things we saw. But everything was so cheap, we could try it all for mere cents a serving: enormous vats of cold watermelon juice; takoyaki balls sizzling in their molds; teriyaki steak cubes; hand-pulled noodles; deep-fried sesame balls stuffed with taro and pork floss; grilled squid; deep-fried squid; skewers of spiralized potatoes, lifted fresh from a vat of bubbling oil. We found the stinky tofu stand: This was legendary, obligatory. We all pinched our noses, tried one piece each, and agreed it was not so bad. Skipper insisted he didn’t find it stinky at all, but he didn’t go back for seconds. We found a stall selling oh-chien, Taiwan’s famous oyster pancakes. I was able to explain why they were famous, because I had researched it the night before: They were invented by the rebel general Koxinga, who fried oysters and potato starch to save his men from famine during a campaign against the Dutch. We agreed the oyster pancakes were just okay—a little slimier than we’d like. They probably tasted great if you were starving on a beach.

We piled into a shaved ice café chiefly because it had plastic chairs and air-conditioning. JC crushed two bottles of water in a minute flat. At the next table over, a group of white tourists were oohing and ahhing over their trays. They had never tried tapioca balls before—they were holding them up to eye level like exotic specimens. “Mouthfeel,” they kept saying, while making faces. “What a unique mouthfeel!” I caught Anna’s eye, and we giggled.

“QQ” was the word. I had read several essays about this. QQ was that springy, chewy mouthfeel: not quite rubbery, not plasticky, not artificial, but wholesome, almost cute. QQ was squishy cheeks and bouncing mascots; was bubble tea, aloe vera jelly, and glutinous rice balls. A taste for QQ was like an ear for tones: either you were lucky and born with it, or you could try very hard to acquire it, with uncertain results. This was a silly reason to feel superior to other tourists, but in that moment I did. I had a right to this place, and they didn’t, because I liked gummy things.

IN THE MORNING, WE GORGED ON FRESH FRUIT FROM THE STAND across the street: enormous white peaches, golden mangoes, crisp Asian pears, tangerines that shed their skins with the barest tug. We bought a bushel of rust-red lychees the size of our palms, which exploded with juice so sticky that we could only eat them outside in the park, hunched over plastic bags to catch the drips, and even so, ants formed hopeful lines around our feet. I had never tasted lychees like this in the States. Those brown, shriveled things you could only find three months of the year at 99 Ranch Market—they did not compare. I had fuzzy memories of tagging behind my grandmother at a park in Guangzhou, begging for one more piece. But she always said no, because lychee was full of “fire,” and so much fire would be bad for me. I’d never known what that meant, though now I felt a sear in my throat when we finished the bushel. I’d cracked the code. Could fire symbolize inflammation?

Dragon fruit was the best: a perfect mix of sweet and sour; thicker on your tongue than watermelon, still so soft you could scoop it out with a spoon, or even better, cut it into wedges and peel the skin while you chewed. Dragon fruit came in white, yellow, or purple, but the purple dragon fruit were like dye canisters. I discovered this in the bathroom—when I wiped, the tissue came away looking like I’d colored it with a marker. I stared into the bowl. The water looked radioactive. Black seeds floated at the top, undigested, coated in slime. I almost called for Anna to come and see. But I didn’t have my phone, and I didn’t know the Chinese for “pigment.”

WE LEARNED THAT TAIPEI 101 WAS THE ELEVENTH-TALLEST SKYSCRAPER in the world, and had been the tallest skyscraper when it was built in 2004, before it was overtaken by the Burj Khalifa. We could see it from any point in the city—when we climbed Elephant Mountain and everyone lost signal, we used it to find our way back into town. “It looks like takeout boxes,” said Skipper. “Is that racist to say? It looks like eight Chinese takeout boxes stacked on top of each other.”

We bought tickets to ride a special elevator to the viewing platform at the top. This took only thirty seconds. Numbers whizzed by on the display as we flew up through each of the 101 floors. There was no sound or shudder to indicate we had moved. Our ears popped, and we all pressed our fingers against our temples at once.

On the top floor, there were lookout points along wraparound glass walls. Some areas were designated for you to take photos with the whole city laid out beneath you, and other areas were decorated for social media, so that you could, for instance, take photos like you were on a fairy throne. I pressed against the glass and squinted as hard as I could into the distance, trying to glimpse the sea behind the mountains.

We kept seeing posters of a round black-and-yellow mascot whose face resembled an electrical outlet. The English translation read “Damper Baby.” At first I thought this was a bad translation of “diaper,” and wondered why a Diaper Baby was plastered all over the top floor of Taipei’s tallest building. But then we found some explanatory text and learned it really was a damper ball. This was a technical term. The Damper Baby represented the enormous steel sphere that hung like a pendulum inside Taipei 101 to stabilize it against earthquakes.

We went down one floor so we could see this damper ball in action. Along the hallway were screens playing footage of Taipei 101 swaying visibly during typhoons. Taipei was located above a tectonic fault—it apparently saw hundreds of low-magnitude earthquakes a year. One day the whole city might collapse, and even this damper ball would go crashing to the ground. But not yet. The damper ball was honey colored, tiered like a beehive, suspended from the ceiling by four golden cords. It looked like a massive Ferrero Rocher chocolate ball. When I leaned close, I could see it quivering ever so slightly. I took a picture and texted it to my father, who had studied engineering in college.

Inertia, he responded. A very powerful force.

DOWNSTAIRS, IN TAIPEI 101’S BASEMENT FOOD COURT, WE EMBARRASSED ourselves trying to order lunch. Food words were somehow the hardest nouns to learn. Words like “burger” and “bowl” and “baked” were okay, but then there were specialized terms like “osmanthus” and “hibiscus,” words we rarely encountered in everyday speech, impossible to decipher on a menu. Anna and I tried ordering the set lunch from the Sichuanese stall, but then we struggled to select our vegetable sides—we didn’t know the words for cucumber, oyster mushroom, or lotus. I must have learned them at some point, but in the moment, I couldn’t recall them. The best I could do was point and nod. “That one, that one—and that one.”

I’d always struggled with ordering Chinese food back home. Chinese restaurants were where Chinese Americans went to feel shame. Every now and then I got overconfident and tried to order for my friends. 四位, I would tell the hostess: literally, “four positions”; figuratively, “Could we have a table for four?” Then we would sit, and I would scrutinize the menu, etching in my short-term memory the names of the dishes I knew we wanted. 魚香茄子—sautéed garlic eggplant. 宮保雞丁—kung pao chicken. I rehearsed these names under my breath, so I wouldn’t have to read them haltingly off the menu when the time came. Sometimes someone wanted to try something new, but I dissuaded them if I didn’t know the characters involved. Snow peas with shrimp? Forget it.

The waiter would come by, and I would smoothly rattle off our order, even ask for a pot of jasmine tea and rice bowls all around. This won me such admiration! The waiter spoke only to me. I was the conduit here, and my friends gazed wonderingly as I carried out the exchange.

But then came the modifications. Someone wanted to know if the cabbage was cooked in chicken broth, or if it was vegetarian. Someone wanted to modify the spice level of the kung pao chicken. Disaster—now I had to go off script, and everyone watched as I scrambled for the words, patching them into imperfect sentences. Someone was allergic to peanuts, but I forgot the word for “peanuts.” Does this have, um . . . um. The closest thing I could think of was the word for “almonds,” because almond jelly was one of my favorite desserts. And I did not know the word for allergy. I knew it was related to the word for “sensitive,” but calling my friend sensitive would not clarify things. Peanuts were a matter of life and death; I could not approximate.

The moment I switched back to English, the waiter gave me a knowing look. Then the rest of the order would proceed in English, and I would sink back in my chair, my authority diminished. 花生, I would remember, too late. Peanuts were 花生, fucking duh. I could switch back to Chinese for things like water, more tea, or the check. But there would be no point. They had already seen through me.

AT THE BAKERY, I HADN’T YET OPENED MY MOUTH WHEN THE GIRL at the register reported my total in English. This also happened at the bubble tea stand, the post office, and the umbrella store.

“That’s normal,” said Skipper. “Young Taiwanese people like to practice their English.”

Still, I felt marked. What had given me away?

WE TOOK THE RED LINE TO LIBERTY SQUARE, WHERE WE WALKED up eighty-nine steps to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall to stand under the great bronze statue of the first president of Taiwan. I realized I had no idea how Chiang Kai-shek was perceived here: whether people adored him (on account of his founding the nation), despised him (on account of all the authoritarian repression), or generally admired him and accepted his foibles the way Americans did George Washington. Not far from the Memorial Hall was the 228 Peace Memorial Park. We argued briefly over which peace this was memorializing, exactly. Anna was certain that it was about the Cold War détente, and Belinda thought it had to do with the Japanese, and when we consulted the internet it turned out neither of them was right: It was about the February 28 Massacre of 1947, in which the Nationalists had killed thousands of civilians protesting Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. JC said that he had read an article about how Taiwan was now debating removing all public statues of Chiang Kai-shek, and that made us feel worse about our Memorial Hall selfies.

In my freshman history classes I had gathered the impression that Chiang Kai-shek was a corrupt president, a wartime leader so obsessed with eradicating the Communists that one of his own generals had to kidnap him to persuade him to start fighting back against the Japanese. My mother, a mainlander, told me once that she had grown up calling him Baldy Chiang. She said that the Communists were very good at coming up with insults based on personal appearance. As a child, she and her schoolmates would skip down the road and sing: The Chiangs were so poor after they fled to Taiwan that they couldn’t even afford clothing, just a bikini, and they tried to cover up the front, and then the back, but it didn’t matter, their butts were still exposed.