Page 51 of Taipei Story

“I just feel like it’s important. Knowing what they’ve been through.”

“You never wanted to know before.”

“I was being stupid before.” I was crying again. I tried to quash it down, since I knew this would only irritate her further, but I just couldn’t stop. “But I really want to know now, Mom, I want to know where I came from.”

“But you see . . .” My mother began a word, and then broke it off, then made a sound that wasn’t a word at all. “But you didn’t come from that. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

IN THE SIXTH GRADE, MY FRIEND ERIN PRITZKER INVITED ME TO her grandfather’s eightieth birthday party at the Fairmont hotel downtown. It would be a huge event, she told me; over a hundred relatives were flying in. I had never been to a party at a hotel ballroom. My mother made me wear my piano recital dress with silver-buckled black leather shoes, and I whined about this until Erin’s mom came to pick me up and I saw Erin was dressed the same way.

We were assigned to seats for dinner: Erin found her table number on a big board listing everyone’s names, and when we got there we found little name cards in front of every folded napkin: Erin Pritzker, Erin Pritzker Guest. There was a big buffet table, with large silver trays of foods that seemed in no way culturally linked, such as macaroni and cheese, samosas, and chicken piccata.

I kept seeing girls, young women, and older women who looked exactly how I imagined Erin might in five, ten, fifteen years. The same brown-blond hair, the same green eyes, the same pert nose. I was astonished when Erin told me she didn’t know their names. She would say things like I think that’s Audrey? I think those are the cousins from Maryland? And not everyone knew who Erin was either. Several times people asked who I was, and when I said I was here with Erin, they looked confused, until someone told them, Jenna’s girl, the Pritzkers, and then they would say to Erin, Oh yes, how are you, how is your mother?

Imagine having so much family that you didn’t know who they were! I had only two cousins, and they both lived in Guangzhou. I told this to Erin, who asked, why didn’t they have more kids? I had just learned about the one-child policy in school, and I was confident this had something to do with it. I explained: When the Communists took over, China didn’t have enough food to go around, so they put a limit on how many children people could have, and no one wanted girls, so people were aborting or abandoning baby girls until they gave birth to boys. “Wow,” said Erin. “So your parents would have left you in a field.” I said that I thought my parents were more progressive than that, but yes—perhaps so.

A toddler waddled around the ballroom and people cooed wherever it went. People kept picking it up and letting it sit on their laps. I watched for a while, but I couldn’t make out who its parents were. Was this safe? How could you drop a baby in the middle of a hundred people and trust that not a single one of them meant it harm?

Lots of people told us to work hard in school, and to not get too distracted by the boys. Lots of people came up with open arms and shouted, “Hello, you!” The first time this happened I watched and wondered, why was Erin hugging this man? Why was she telling him about school, what did he care? Erin didn’t know herself. An uncle, maybe? A first cousin? What an interesting concept this was! Intimacy with people you couldn’t pick out of a crowd, intimacy as assumed goodwill, intimacy as obligation, even with people you might never see again.

Erin’s grandmother gave me a silver hair clip and said I looked very pretty. The nice blond women who looked like older versions of Erin kept asking if I had had enough to eat, and when the ice cream sundae station was set out, they made sure I got to the front of the line. I wished I had aunts in this country. I had never been so coddled in my life.

When my mother picked me up I asked if we could make Gonggong and Popo come back to America and throw them a party at the Fairmont too, and only now did I understand what she’d meant when she’d said that no one would come.

WHILE I WAS WAITING FOR THE BUS HOME, I RECEIVED A LONG TEXT from Anna.

She was coming back to the apartment. She couldn’t keep imposing on Margrit’s space; she didn’t think that was fair. However, given how uncomfortable we were around each other, she thought it best if we could try avoiding the apartment when the other was present. She was studying at home this afternoon; she had an oral presentation tomorrow and she really needed to focus, so could I find somewhere else to be until bedtime? Ten o’clock, at least.

I considered fighting back. Anna’s proposal was slightly more reasonable than evicting me, but still she could not possibly ask me to stay out on a day when temperatures exceeded one hundred degrees. But then I thought about that dimly lit room, and the empty box of tissues on the coffee table, and the bedpost I had clung to, sobbing, every afternoon this week. Then I stepped onto the first bus that arrived and settled in to see where it would take me.

WITHOUT THE APARTMENT TO ANCHOR ME, I REALIZED I HAD FREE run of this city: I could go anywhere or see anything, and no one would stop me. Until now I had kept to such strict circuits: home, then class, then home, then class. But that was ridiculous. I had total freedom—why was I acting like I had a curfew?

I got off the bus at Liberty Square, the park complex that housed the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. I had it in my head that I wanted a full blast of nationalist propaganda—to see if I could feel some affective response to this idea of a Chinese republic that my grandfather had left Cambodia for.

I was the only person in the square. It was a weekday afternoon, when all the locals would still be at school or work, and it seemed the heat had driven away the tourists. The skies were clear, brutally bright, and the light shone so intensely off the white pavement that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I could only squint at the ground. This was the smallest my shadow had ever been. It was so neatly tucked under my shoes, I could almost pretend it had vanished.

Halfway up the steps, I felt a hit of vertigo. I had not eaten anything that day. In fact, I had not been eating very much that week. I hadn’t meant to fast. Grief blocked up the stomach; I had been too nauseous to eat. But I had discovered that when I went hours without eating I achieved a certain lightness, and that lightness felt good. I wasn’t trying to die or anything, but I did like this feeling of becoming less substantial. The closer I became to air, the less I would feel.

But now the heat beat against my back, and I felt black pressing in at the edges of my vision. My knees buckled. I realized I might be in trouble.

I needed shade, and then food. The nearest locations where I could acquire either of these things were the National Theater and the National Concert Hall, twin buildings that faced each other at the opposite end of the square. They were built in that classical, ornamental Chinese style: sloping pagoda roofs with burnt-orange tiles, and gaudy red columns lining the sides. I’d never been inside either. The last time we had come here, soldiers in full dress had been practicing marching drills by the doors, and we had been too intimidated to approach.

The theater looked closed, but the doors to the concert hall were propped open. I walked inside and found myself in a packed lobby—there were at least a hundred people milling around. A few, like me, were dressed like they had just stumbled in after class. But most of the crowd were dressed formally: floor-length dresses, dark jackets over trousers. A grand piano stood in the center of the lobby, where people were lining up to take photographs.

Where had all these people come from? The square had seemed deserted—I hadn’t seen anyone walking in or out. I saw dozens of people in long sleeves, but there wasn’t a drop of sweat on their foreheads, and I found it hard to believe they could have trekked here from outside like I had. Was there a network of underground tunnels I did not know about?

This was so incongruous with the blinding solitude of the square. I felt as if I had stepped out of one film and into another—the genres had switched on me. But it was cool inside, and nobody seemed bothered by my presence. I stood by the center staircase and rested my forearms against the wooden banister, letting the hubbub of voices wash over me.

“Do you have a ticket?”

I glanced up. A young woman in a black suit stood before me, a ticket scanner in hand.

“Oh—no, sorry.”

She looked me up and down. I was trying to remember how to explain I was just looking around the lobby, but then she asked, “Are you a student?”

“Um—yes?”

“We have some complimentary tickets reserved for students.” She handed me a program. “Today’s program features Liszt’s poetic and religious harmonies. If you have proof of identity, I can give you a student ticket.”