Page 52 of Taipei Story

I pulled out my NTU card. She glanced down, nodded in approval, and waved me through. Then I was following the crowd along the velvet ropes toward the hall. Well, why not? I had no great passion for classical music, nor any particular knowledge about Liszt. I just wanted to be a part of the crowd, to experience whatever they were experiencing. If they were so excited about it, then it must be something worth seeing.

I found a seat near the front and flipped open my program. It was in Chinese, but I was startled by how much of it was immediately comprehensible to me. I wasn’t struggling to read. The pianist was from Israel, and he was a big deal: He had performed at concert halls throughout Europe and the Americas and been a soloist with all sorts of philharmonic orchestras. This was his first time in Taiwan. The National Concert Hall was honored to host him.

I thought there would be more pomp and circumstance when the concert began, but no one gave a speech or anything. The stage lights came on, and the audience fell silent. Out came the pianist, a dour-faced man who did not so much as crack a smile as we applauded. He gave a short bow, sat down, and touched the keys. A tremor came over his shoulders; then he hunched over and began a series of slow, gentle broken chords. I checked my program: Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude.

The woman in the row behind me kept murmuring to her companion, in English, that she wished they had sat farther back. “Up close is no good,” she hissed. “It’s like you’re watching a recital in your living room.” But I liked being up close. I liked seeing the pianist’s hands, and the white of his shirtsleeves poking through the dark of his jacket. He reminded me of a chef. What was it they said? Good chefs had clean sleeves? I liked the way he jerked one hand or the other up in the air every time he finished a trill, as if getting it clear of the musical soup. Like the keyboard was a wash of ingredients and here he was, stirring it around, never letting it splash.

The concert hall was dark, deliciously cool. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. I felt that hit of vertigo again. For a moment I was afraid that my hunger had caught up with me, and that I would faint in my seat. But then a marvelous thing happened. The lightness intensified, but I did not lose consciousness. Rather, my body, or my perception of my body, melted away entirely, until all that existed was the sound. A tension released from my head. I was free from this struggle to make myself and the world articulable. I did not have to say anything or interpret anything. As I sat there in the dark, I felt the core of myself, that part that was capable of conscious reflection, drift outside of my body and toward the stage, riding the notes and going wherever they took me.

How did music paint an image in your head? I wondered. How could it be that certain combinations of notes struck the same emotions in different listeners? In my freshman Introduction to Philosophy class, we had learned how Schopenhauer argued that music was the highest of all the arts, because it did not try to represent any ideas from the material world. Painting and sculpture and poetry were mere shadows of reality, just approximations of ideas, but music was pre-language, pre-association. Only music captured the Will.

But that could not be quite right, because I could see so clearly in my mind’s eye the narrative of this piece. Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude—the blessing of God, received in solitude. I did not compose this image from thin air; I saw what the notes told me to see. I saw the lonely man praying on his knees, whispering in silence, Oh, God. Saw his lips moving; saw his head bowed in the dark, his eyes squeezed shut and brow furrowed. Saw the sun coming up, the light streaming through stained glass, and the glow rising around him. Then the chords crescendoed, and the angels joined in his song, and I saw that man lifting his face, rising up on his knees, because his prayers had worked, and someone was listening after all, and the heavens were answering his call.

6

Courtesy of the author

On Monday, I made a bargain with myself.

I split myself into three temporal identities. This was the best way to understand my current state of mind. One version of me existed before receiving my mother’s text, and she was perhaps not having the most wonderful time in Taipei but was getting by. Then, right now, there was a stricken mind and a body that had to be dealt with, cleaned and fed and put in the right places at the right times. And then, several months or maybe a year from now, there hopefully existed a version of me who wasn’t crying all the time. She would be very glad to have had all these cultural experiences, and disappointed if she’d squandered her summer abroad. So if it made no difference to me now, I might as well create some good memories for that future self.

This temporal bargain also worked in the short term. If I put myself in a public place, then the chances improved that I would do the things to comport with that place. You couldn’t just lie down and cry in a café, for example. You had to minimally keep it together. And you couldn’t have a breakdown at the National Concert Hall, or spend class in a depressed fugue, and so on. So if I mustered the willpower to get out there now, then I might be rewarded in the future.

In the Zhuangzi there was a story about a monkey keeper who promised his monkeys that they could have four peaches for dinner if they could get by on just three peaches for breakfast. Then of course at dinnertime, he gave them only three peaches but promised four peaches for breakfast the next morning, and so on and so on. The monkeys never wised up. The chengyu based on this fable was 朝三暮四: three in the morning, four in the afternoon. It was used to describe someone facetious and unreliable, someone who was always changing the story. But I was deceiving myself here, and I didn’t think it was so nefarious. The monkey keeper wasn’t trying to starve his monkeys, he was just trying to give them some hope. You could delude yourself into believing lots of things if you trusted that eventually life would get better.

OF COURSE, WHEN THE TIME CAME I NEVER WANTED TO GO.

Every morning, I ran through the same mental dialectic while the clock ticked closer to nine. Getting up, simply constituting myself as a subject involved such strain, and what if we shattered into a million pieces on the bus, what if we dissolved into a puddle at the department, what if today was the day that Teacher Cai pointed at me and asked a question and my skull cracked trying to answer?

But if I did not go, there would be no structure to the day. Then I would have nothing to do, and no choice but to lie facedown in bed, sapped of the willpower to move. Anything worth doing would lose its prospects as the day went by, until finally it was nine in the evening and still I would not have moved, and then I would not be able to sleep because I had already slept all day. And then I would be alone, in the dark, thinking of the killing fields.

I SOUGHT OUT PLACES WHERE I COULD BE A PART OF A CROWD. I wanted to be around Taiwanese people, but I was embarrassed that in all this time I had not formed a relationship with a single Taiwanese person except my teachers, who were paid to spend time with me. Somehow I’d been even worse at this than Skipper. I could blame this on the structure of the program: My department was full of foreigners, and outside of class time there were not many organic opportunities to make friends. Anyhow, it seemed unethical to force a friendship on the locals, to demand that they contribute to my experience abroad.

Meanwhile there were so many shared, public tableaus I could join. I gravitated toward concerts, films, cafés, and crowds. I had stopped reading reviews on Google Maps. Every day I would get on a different bus and keep riding until I noticed a lot of people were getting off, and then I would follow this critical mass to wherever they were going next. I wandered around industrial parks and shopping plazas. I walked through residential districts. I loved cafés most of all. You didn’t have to pay much to go into a café, and you could stay there for as long as you liked, listening to the conversations floating in the air. I tried not to form a routine circuit. I sought out a new café every afternoon, just to be around people who were working and talking. I went to a bubble tea café on the top floor of a bookstore near campus where every drink came with cheese foam by default. Where had this Asian obsession with cheese come from? You had to specifically request its removal if you didn’t want cheese foam. I went to Tò-uat Books, where the letters on the window read: “RESIST CHINA / FREEDOM NOW / #FREETIBET / #STANDWITHHK / #SAVEUYGHUR / #STANDWITHUKRAINE,” and a blue banner indoors read, “Hong Kong is NOT China,” and the low door in front of the coffee kiosk was draped with a Pride flag. Such purpose! I wanted to linger inside, but there was some kind of book club going on, and everyone looked so serious that I was scared off.

I went several times to Editor Books & Café, which was a short bike ride south of campus. Like so many Taipei cafés, Editor Café was designed in imitation of some European aesthetic, but it refused to settle on just one. Soft-light banker lamps sat at each table, with jade-green lampshades and gleaming brass necks. Mozart played gently from the speakers. There was a large selection of translated foreign titles, mostly by philosophers I had never read. The menu offered an eclectic selection: Here one could order a Sicilian coffee, a Swedish fisksoppa, or a classic bolognese. I ordered the beef tomato curry, which was brought to me on a wooden tray with the sort of domed metal top I’d seen only in films set in hotels. My curry hadn’t been microwaved long enough; the beef chunks were still frozen on the inside, but I didn’t mind. The vibes were too good. A pretty girl with two long, swinging braids took the table across from me, and I watched her pull out an Advanced English Through Literature textbook. I was making flash cards from my Modern Taiwanese Literature textbook. She caught my eye, and we both smiled.

A group of six adults came in once while I was studying. I watched them for a while, trying to determine their relationship to one another. It wasn’t obvious. They all seemed to know at least one other person present, but not everyone knew everyone in the group. They kept making introductions. Here was an old friend from college. Here was a colleague at the department. They kept hugging. I liked their way of speaking. They seemed so patient, so gentle with one another. They ordered lunch—three butter chicken curries and two beef tomato stews—and when everyone’s tray had arrived, they linked hands, bowed their heads, and prayed.

IN THE EVENINGS, I KEPT GOING BACK TO THE NATIONAL CONCERT Hall. I could always get discounted student tickets, and there was always something going on, every night of the week.

The audience was not always as well behaved as they had been for the Israeli pianist. That had been a special occasion, it turned out. I rarely saw foreigners in the concert hall after that. Never again did I see a full house. Most of the time, only a quarter of the seats were occupied. When local musicians played, people showed up in tank tops and shorts. At a string quartet performance by four Taiwanese sisters, the old woman behind me sat cracking peanut shells between her teeth the entire time.

Once during a performance by the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, a cell phone went off between movements and kept ringing for an unreasonably long interval. The audience rustled. A few people laughed. The conductor—an esteemed guest conductor visiting from Germany—turned around and threw up his arms, and his eyes flashed a look that said, These people.

IT WAS STRANGE THAT I SHOULD ADORE CLASSICAL MUSIC NOW, when as a child I had thrown so many tantrums over being forced to practice the violin that finally my mother let me quit.

One night I strolled into the concert hall on a whim without reading the program description. There was a full orchestra onstage, but all the performers were unexpectedly young—at least two of them could have been in middle school. The conductor explained to us that this was the summer recital of Taiwan’s youth orchestra. He’d founded this youth orchestra in his home city of Taoyuan to create more career and development opportunities for young artists. The musicians we were hearing tonight, all under eighteen, had made it through several rounds of regional, then national auditions. They were the best of the best. I felt a small burn of resentment, though I had not touched an instrument in years. This reaction was ingrained, instinctive. Any well-behaved Chinese child was a threat.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the first violin—a tall, long-limbed boy in a black suit that was much too short in the arms. His hair was slicked back so neatly, except for a single strand that kept falling over his eyes. He played with his whole body. His eyes fluttered closed whenever the music swelled, and he swooned this way and that, dancing in his seat. Back home he would have been named something like Kevin or Jonathan. He probably would have played during worship at church, and all the parents would have fawned over him, and I would have had a confused crush on him, and all the college admissions officers would have rolled their eyes as they wrote off another Asian applicant whose extracurricular was orchestra. Back home he would have been a stereotype; here, he was just a kid who loved his violin. I wondered if I would have stuck with the violin if I’d grown up in Taipei, and I imagined myself for a moment as one of the girls onstage beside him. Shiny black hair braided down my back. Shiny black dress; shiny black shoes, toes tapping to the beat.

EVERY TIME I LEFT THE CONCERT HALL, I PONDERED WHY I HAD come all this way just to listen to music from Western Europe. I felt a little guilty spending my fellowship funds on concert tickets, since technically we were only supposed to spend money on “Taiwanese cultural enrichment activities,” and listening to classical music by European composers was in no way a Taiwanese cultural enrichment activity, unless you considered the fact that many of the musicians and audience were Taiwanese, so didn’t whatever they participated in count as a Taiwanese activity?

Anyhow, I’d given up on the project of authentic connection. Taiwan had as little to do with me as Franz Liszt did. My family was not from here. I was in fact the first person in my family to visit Taipei; my mother was the second. Gonggong had never set foot on this island. He very well could have; that branch path did exist. If he had stuck with the Nationalists, if he had fled here in 1949 with all the other soldiers and their families, then I might have grown up visiting relatives in a high-rise in Taoyuan who took me to hotel restaurants where sesame buns looked like pears. But this was not how things had gone, and any nostalgia this place induced in me was for a past in the subjunctive: maybe, should have, if only.

This rupture was very freeing. It absolved anything I saw from the burden of significance. I was not homecoming and I was not a tourist. I was just a student, and I was living in a city among two and a half million other people, many of whom loved Liszt, just like me, and we were all calling this place home, for now.

I WAS GETTING PRACTICED AT PICKING THE AMERICAN SUMMER transplants out of a crowd. They were the grumpiest and sweatiest, and the older they were, the more unhappy they looked. The boys whined as they trailed behind their parents, complaining that their data service was not fast enough, and the girls sat sullen, arms folded tight across their stomachs, picking at their food.