Page 53 of Taipei Story

I sympathized. My mother had taken me on a trip to Shanghai the summer after I started high school, a stinking hot trip that was comprised largely of waiting in lines while standing in the shade, cooling myself with a souvenir battery-powered fan. I had spent most of it shutting out the world with my Skullcandy headphones, staring out bus windows, counting down the hours until our flight home.

Twelve through sixteen were the worst ages to come back to China; the worst ages, period. Your boobs were coming in, but so was the rest of your body fat. Nothing fit right. Your skin was greasy, painful, and red; you tried every product at the drugstore, but none of them worked. You had to buy new clothes every few months, but no matter how often you sized up your jeans, you kept squeezing out the sides. It was too hot, too humid, and you were too grumpy to face your relatives’ goodwill. Everyone marveled over how big you’d gotten, but you could read the shock in their faces: You had been ravaged by hormones; you were not cute anymore. Several years ago one of our aunts in Guangzhou had taken Jasmine for some kind of treatment promised to resolve her cystic acne; there was an allergic reaction, something to do with a needle, and many screaming recriminations, and Jasmine never went back to China again.

You were struggling enough to become a subject in the culture that you knew. Now was the worst time to throw into the mix all the possible versions of you that you now could not be. All you could see were the ways in which the Chinese kids were better than you: poreless, sweatless, excellent at math, skilled at weaving their bikes in and out of traffic. How cruel it was to throw a steak-fed, butter-creamy American child into Asia and ask: Could you survive here? Could you fit in?

God—and then they wanted you to speak! It was fine for small children to utter only one or two phrases in Chinese. Children were applauded if they could say anything coherent at all. But a fourteen-year-old was approaching adulthood, was educated now, and when a fourteen-year-old had to ask her mother to translate a phrase like “Is there ginger in this?” it put her in a different tier of shame.

I saw these teenagers; I knew all they felt was stupid, slow, and inadequate, just as I had felt on those trips. This was an alien environment, and though their parents could switch back without effort, that bridge had been shattered for them long ago. It was not happening for them anymore. And each trip would be more uncomfortable, more alienating and diminishing, until they stopped coming at all.

It doesn’t matter, I wanted to tell them. Stop counting down the minutes. Ask for the words you don’t know. Use your phone. Use your bad grammar. Be stupid, slow, and inadequate. Just be here.

I ONLY EVER RETURNED TO THE APARTMENT TO SLEEP THESE DAYS, which meant often I did not come back until around midnight. I could therefore avoid any interaction with Anna. Sometimes she was already fast asleep when I got back, or at least nestled so deeply in bed that she could pretend not to notice me. Sometimes she didn’t come back all night. I considered asking her about her schedule, just so I could spend an evening in for once. But I didn’t want her to know I cared. I enjoyed this game of chicken—bluffing that we both had somewhere better to be. I liked staying out. I took pride in my capability to roam, untethered, unbothered.

I RECEIVED AN EMAIL REMINDER FROM KLOOK: MY PINGLIN COUNTY Tea Tour was in twenty-four hours, the bus pickup point was outside one of the entrances to the Taipei 101 station, and I would recognize my guide by his blue-and-white checkered flag. I had entirely forgotten about this tour. Anna and I had booked it during our first week in Taipei, when we were still determined to go on day trips every weekend. I decided to go: The activity was well reviewed, and I had already paid. If Anna wanted to join me, then she was welcome.

Anna did not come. I was the only solo traveler. The activity description had promised a private tour, but I understood now that this meant it was a private tour for all the strangers who showed up to comprise the group. There was a white family from Philadelphia, which I knew because the parents kept informing the people in the rows in front of and behind them that they were from Philadelphia. There was an Asian American family decked out entirely in Harvard gear: T-shirts, caps, backpacks, and everything. The mother and father were sleekly attractive, and their twin sons, who looked about my age, were inappropriately tall. There were three Singaporean women with the palest skin I’d ever seen, covered head-to-toe with hats, sunglasses, and long-sleeved shirts. Last on the bus was a couple about my age, perhaps a bit older, whom I couldn’t have placed racially or nationally if I’d tried. They were late; they came sprinting onto the bus five minutes past the designated departure time. I thought perhaps the girl was at least part Chinese because she apologized to the driver in fluent, melodic Mandarin. But when they got on the bus behind me, they kept toggling between French and English. The boy was handsome, but the girl was unbearably beautiful, with pale skin and freckles and thick, loosely curled brown hair. I couldn’t keep looking at them; I was so jealous.

Our tour guide was a squat, smiling man with glasses. He introduced himself as Jackie: “like Jackie Chan, so you won’t forget.” He explained he had styled himself as Jackie several years ago because tourists kept butchering his real name, and there was a pause before everyone chuckled.

Jackie spoke into a microphone at the front of the bus. There were mini speakers installed at intervals along the ceiling, so that no matter where we sat, it sounded like he was speaking right in our ears. We were making three stops today: first, a tea plantation; second, a village teashop to experience a traditional tea pouring ceremony; and third, the Pinglin Tea Museum. It was about a ninety-minute drive to our first location, and we had a lot to do, so he hoped that we had all used the restroom.

Jackie played a few Taiwanese pop songs over the speakers, but one of the Singaporeans complained that the static was giving her a headache, so he stopped. We drove on for a while in silence, and then Jackie told us a story about how once upon a time, in another life as a delivery driver, he had been so prone to falling asleep on the road that he had resorted to chewing betel nuts as he drove with a tin bucket in his lap for spitting. Then he laughed and said not to worry; our driver today was much more responsible.

OUR FIRST STOP WAS ALONG A MOUNTAIN ROAD BENEATH AN oolong tea field: a slope of dark-green shrubs in neat, terraced rows. Jackie told us that many of the blends that we thought were different teas were in fact the same plant: The leaves had just been processed differently. Black tea was just heavily oxidized green tea, did we know? The Singaporeans gasped. The Philadelphians accused Jackie of pulling their leg, but then one of the Harvard parents looked it up and confirmed: Black and green teas came from the same plant. Jackie explained that the fields we were looking at were a special variety of oolong that was harvested only after the leaves had been bitten by leafhoppers. This tea was called 蜜香烏龍, which translated to “honey-fragrant oolong.” When brewed, Jackie claimed, this tea was just as fragrant as honey.

“苦盡甘來,” I said. I had just learned this chengyu in Thought and Society. It meant: When the bitter times end, the sweet times begin.

“No, no,” said Jackie. “It’s just a chemical process.”

We had half an hour to roam around the plantation, but we had to stay behind the ropes. The dad from Philadelphia reached over and plucked a leaf to chew, and Jackie yelled at him to stop. Jackie didn’t know the owner of these fields. We could park here, but we were only entitled to the road. We weren’t allowed to touch the tea leaves. Only the leafhoppers could.

Everyone splintered off to photograph the fields. I was obviously alone, so the mother of the Harvard family asked if I wouldn’t mind taking some photos for the family. The twins were so tall, it was hard to get all of them in the same frame. I tried several angles, but no matter what I did, the twins looked enormous, or the parents looked like children. The mother swiped through every photo when I handed her phone back, and I could tell she didn’t like them at all, but still she said, “Very nice, thank you.”

She spoke English without any trace of an accent. I asked if she had family in Taiwan, and she said no; she was Chinese American, and her folks were from the mainland, around Shanghai. “But Taiwan was easier to get to without a visa. It’s the first time the boys have come anywhere in Asia; we wanted them to have a better idea of where they were from.”

There was no sense in which any of us were from Taiwan, but I understood her point. So they were just like me—using Taiwan as an entry point to the imperial core.

“My colleagues said that Taiwan is like, China on easy mode,” said her husband.

I asked what he meant by that, and he said, “I suppose it’s easier to visit democracies. Everyone said Taiwan would be safer.”

I asked what they had done so far, and the mother rattled off the classics: Taipei 101, Elephant Mountain, the National Palace Museum, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. One of the sons was interested in jazz, and so they had attended a basement jazz concert they’d seen advertised on a flyer, but she wasn’t terribly impressed by the music. It had sounded more like a student production. No one did any improvising; they just played from sheet music, and not very well. “We’re from Brooklyn,” she told me. “So our standards are a bit higher.”

OUR SECOND STOP WAS A TRADITIONAL TEA SHOP IN PINGLIN. Jackie asked us to split into two tables, one that could speak Chinese and one that couldn’t. He would do an English translation at the non-Chinese table, but the Chinese speakers could hear directly from our host, Master Luo. I sat down at the Chinese-speaking table with the attractive maybe-French couple and the Singaporeans. There was some confusion at the English-speaking table. It appeared that between the Philadelphians and the Harvard family there was not enough space, and so someone would have to join us.

Jackie asked if anyone might be willing to translate. I glanced at the Singaporeans, and then at the attractive couple, and when nobody raised a hand, I said I could give it a try. Rolling his eyes, one of the twins came over and sat down beside me. He smelled sweaty and sour, in a confusingly pleasant way—the same way JC had smelled. He was, alas, quite handsome. But I was immune to that now.

Master Luo explained that the steeping procedure he was about to demonstrate wasn’t particularly fussy or ceremonial. That was more of a Japanese preoccupation. He was just going to show us the standard way to enjoy tea at home—the methods of getting the most nuanced, complex flavors out of the leaves. Still, the steeping process was far more complicated than I had expected. First, Master Luo filled a clay teapot with dried leaves—up to about two-thirds, so that the leaves would have room to expand. Then he poured in water heated to precisely 90 degrees Celsius. Different teas flourished at different temperatures. We could not commit the American mistake of splashing boiling water over everything. The first steep took only twenty seconds. Oolong leaves were meant to be steeped multiple times, at longer intervals each time, and we wouldn’t unlock the leaves’ true potential until the sixth or seventh steeps.

He poured the first steep into narrow porcelain cups. The first steep was never that good, he admitted; more like a quick shower for the leaves, but still we had to drink it. But we couldn’t drink out of these cups. We had to place a second set of wider cups upside down over the narrow cups and then flip them both, then pull away the narrow cups, so that the tea ended up in the wider cups. Everyone spilled. Master Luo said it took practice. Then we still couldn’t drink the tea, because we had to appreciate its aromas first.

“Smell it,” he said, gesturing to the empty narrow cup. “Let the flavor unfold.”

I sniffed my cup. It just smelled like tea. First whisky, now tea—where were these alleged fruity notes?

“You can roll the empty cup in your hands for warmth.” Master Luo demonstrated. “Feel.”

“Why are we rolling?” the twin asked me.