Page 56 of Taipei Story

“No, hoodoo.” Jackie pulled up a definition on his phone and passed it over to me. The word was indeed “hoodoo”: a tall, thin spire of rock created over millions of years of erosion. Yehliu Geopark had some of the most distinctive hoodoo stones in the world, Jackie told me. People came from all over to see these stones.

He left me at the park entrance with two bottles of water and a printed map of Yehliu Geopark’s most iconic rock formations. “I will meet you here in one hour.” He pointed to a café across the parking lot. He stressed the traffic situation on the way back, and I promised him I would not be late.

I wandered slowly through the rocks, taking care to sip from my water bottle every few minutes. The advice was to always keep your lips wet—that was how you warded off stealth dehydration. It had reached over a hundred degrees outside, under the kind of clear, blinding sky that produced a ringing in your ears, and I was one of very few people on the island. The other tourists included an Asian couple armed with hydration backpacks and three excitable German women. If I positioned myself just so between the rock formations, I could block them from view. Then it was like I was the only life-form present. I had reached not only to the other side of the world but to another planet, another realm entirely, where there was no language to speak, no symbols in the air, only waves breaking against the rocks.

I followed the trail on Jackie’s map until I had identified and photographed every rock formation. There was a Fairy Shoe, a Beehive, a Tofu Rock, and a set of Sea Candles. I learned that the most famous formation was the Queen’s Head, which to me resembled a Nefertiti head: the long arc of its neck, and the voluminous crown jutting out the back. Erosion was a big problem, according to my map. The Queen’s Head’s neck had whittled at an alarming rate; she would likely not survive the decade.

“Schlep,” said one of the Germans, making a gesture like a guillotine across her neck.

But all was not lost. There was a successor rock: the Cute Princess, which had the same elongated neck, though a less defined profile. Tourists were encouraged to flock to the Cute Princess for pictures, so as to leave the Queen’s Head alone and delay her decapitation by another five or so years.

MY MOTHER CONTINUED TO CALL EVERY FEW DAYS TO GIVE UPDATES on the situation in Guangzhou, but she never seemed able to talk for long. It was her first time back in China in several years, and her sisters kept taking her on day trips out of the city, making up for lost time. She sent photos every morning. So far they had hiked up a mountain, gone to a spa, and taken photographs while dressed up in the traditional garb of some unspecified ethnic minority. She and her oldest sister, my dayi, struck the same pose everywhere they went: side by side, outside arms stretched over their heads, meeting in the middle to form a heart.

My mother didn’t want to talk about how Popo was doing, but she did want to talk about a Taiwanese author named Chiung Yao. Chiung Yao had been widely beloved for her romance novels. She had killed herself last winter, but it wasn’t tragic or anything. That was how my mother put it. It was planned. She had been approaching ninety, and she just wanted to exit this life with dignity.

Chiung Yao was born in the same year as Popo, and so if I wanted to know more about my grandparents’ histories, she suggested, I should read Chiung Yao’s wartime memoirs. There was a good YouTube video on this subject. She would send me a link.

“Wow,” I said. “Did they know each other?”

“No, but she was from their same generation.”

“Were they both from Guangzhou?”

“No, Chiung Yao was from Chengdu. But parts of the journey are the same. At least, emotionally. Just read it. You wanted to know more about their histories, didn’t you?”

Someone else’s memoir. I felt a knot in my stomach. Was this as close as I was ever going to get?

I wanted to tell my mother how absurd this was, that this was like telling a child to read John Steinbeck’s novels to understand more about what his grandparents’ generation had gone through during the Great Depression. But the words died on my tongue, because when I thought about it, that was not absurd at all.

THEY WERE DOING ANOTHER LISZT CONCERT AT THE NATIONAL Concert Hall. Someone, somewhere, had declared this the Summer of Liszt. This concert was designed around Liszt’s obsession with death, which, according to my booklet, was perhaps inspired by his father’s fatal bout of typhoid fever when Liszt was fifteen.

Liszt had also been inspired by a medieval fresco called The Triumph of Death in Pisa, painted by Buonamico Buffalmacco. A blurry photo was reproduced in my program; the fresco was not in excellent condition. I held it up to my eyes, squinting to see in the dark. I could just make out what looked like a hunting party: men on horses stumbling upon three open coffins in the woods. These coffins contained one fresh body, one decaying corpse, and one skeleton. The hunters point and gape. Elsewhere, a group of women—the hunters’ wives?—sit oblivious with their embroidery, while above them, angels and demons carry off naked bodies, presumably to heaven or hell. The booklet explained: Death is everywhere, inescapable, triumphant indeed.

The program began with a piano concerto titled Totentanz: the danse macabre, the dance with death. Totentanz opened with rhythmic banging: single, menacing notes, then reinforcements from the brass. The march built, then pulled back to a crawl, and then built again. Endless piano trills, swooping up and down the keys, and as they grew louder I imagined the angels and demons lifted off the page, swirling around the crowd. I felt a searing pain in my jaw; I had been clenching my teeth. My heart beat very fast. I rubbed along my jaw and made myself take a deep breath just as the concerto, too, slowed to a pensive flow. I was frightened—music had never elicited such a visceral reaction from me before.

But that was not the same death that came for my gonggong, I told myself firmly. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to ignore the building arpeggios. Gonggong was not marched off in chains, not dragged off in some frenzied pandemonium. Death came gentle. I had to believe this. Death was a fall, and then a whisper, and then whatever came next.

I STOPPED GOING OUT DURING MY PENULTIMATE WEEK: I HAD TO study for my midterms.

They were called midterms, but really these were the finals—the comprehensive exams that determined our grades. The instructors didn’t like to hold exams on the last week of class, because then we didn’t get a sense of closure. Teacher Xu had explained this at orientation. Submitting exam pages in silence was no way to say goodbye.

I went to Youmoutoohana every day to review from four thirty until closing. Any material from the previous seven weeks was fair game. I was stunned by the gaps in my memory. I would flip open my textbook to a previous chapter and discover I did not recall ever encountering these words or these passages. This seemed impossible, since we had drilled these lists so intensively only one or two weeks prior. They must have left some grooves in my mind. But when I tried to reconnect old synapses, the receiving ends simply weren’t there. When had we discussed the impact of World War II on provincial Chinese identity?

I used to think learning was an endless and expansive process, that I could just keep adding more and more things into my brain until one day I knew everything and could summon any of it at a moment’s notice. I had a good memory—this was my best quality. But now it seemed my mind was only so big, and if I wanted space for new concepts, I had to remove other ones. Perhaps if I improved in Chinese, I would have to regress in English. I had never before considered that there might be a hard cap on what I could carry in my head—that I could try and try, but I would never know everything I needed.

HOW HAD MY PARENTS DONE THIS?

They had achieved a much harder transformation in reverse—they hadn’t just summered in America, they’d become American. But then, they had not been passively floating through, soaking up bits of culture as they presented themselves. They’d weathered the frictions of building a life: They’d rented apartments, studied for degrees, undergone job interviews, applied for citizenship. My father had told me how he’d committed to learning English by absorbing the “best” of Anglophone culture. This meant watching movies. He had taken a course on modern American film during his final semester at Peking University and arrived in California familiar with such masterpieces as Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, and Jaws. My parents loved American cinema. There was no limit to how often they were willing to rewatch a film. I remembered my mother sitting on a kitchen stool after dinner, watching A Few Good Men for the dozenth time. She knew the lines so well, she would utter them a few seconds before the actors did. Is that clear? Crystal. Her favorite joke was that A Few Good Men should be titled A Few Good-Looking Men. At the climax, when Jack Nicholson explodes at Tom Cruise in the courtroom, she would stand up and declare right with him: “You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall!”

Could I do that? I didn’t know any iconic lines from Chinese films. I couldn’t even name any iconic Chinese directors, aside from Zhang Yimou, which was like saying your favorite director was Steven Spielberg.

But my parents had lived in the States for decades, and they still didn’t talk like native English speakers. They could not even manage gendered pronouns. Spoken Mandarin wasn’t gendered; “he,” “she,” and “it” all sounded like ta. My parents, therefore, tossed out “he” and “she” with no regard for the subject; my mother, complaining on the phone about my father, regularly called him “she.” This became a problem in high school, when I learned that misgendering someone was cause for offense. I suggested that my parents use the neutral “they,” but they found the singular “they” unintuitive, so of course they never remembered. In college I finally cracked the code: My father would call someone “he” if the previous word ended in a consonant and “she” if the previous word ended in a vowel.

My parents’ English degraded noticeably when they were trying to be taken seriously. I noticed it more and more as I grew older. In parent-teacher meetings, at the doctor, at grocery checkout lines, at airport security—my parents’ English became more proper and less assured at the same time. Overarticulated vowels, crisp consonants, nearly Victorian diction, as if they were reading from grade-school textbooks—yet still they had to repeat themselves, still they couldn’t make themselves understood. When the stakes were high, my parents’ English turned unsure, stilted, diminished. With the police, they were barely articulate. More than three decades now, and still their tongues betrayed them.

IN MY ONE-ON-ONE CLASS, TEACHER SUN ASKED ME WHETHER I’D started working on my final project draft.

The final project was an exam in disguise. To graduate from the program, we had to write a thousand-character essay and then deliver it as a speech before the assembled faculty. I was working on an essay on how language impacted our personalities and perceptions of the world. I had recently read a novella called “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, in which the protagonist learns an alien language and thereby learns to see the future. She can see the future because the alien language is circular, and its verbs have a different relationship with causality, and so understanding the language’s grammatical structure also alters her perception of time. She knows, for instance, that she will have a daughter and that the daughter will die tragically young, long before the daughter is even conceived. Chiang’s representation of language in “Story of Your Life” assumes the extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that our perceptions of the world are structured entirely by language. Linguists now broadly agreed that the extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis wasn’t true, but the more moderate version was compelling: Our perceptions of the world and our understandings of ourselves were influenced by certain language-contingent metaphors.