Page 57 of Taipei Story

I tried to express all this in the vocabulary I had to Teacher Sun.

She seemed confused. “So do you want to write about aliens?”

“No, they’re just an example.” I faltered. I didn’t have the Chinese yet for “linguistic determinism” or “personal identity.” I had put these terms in my essay draft, but I couldn’t recall how to say them out loud. “I’m arguing that aliens would think about time and space in a totally different way than we do. So I want to argue that people experience the world differently in different languages, and also have different personalities in different languages.”

“Do you feel like a different person when you speak Chinese?” Teacher Sun asked me.

“Definitely,” I said. “In English, I have more confidence. In Chinese, I feel younger, and more naive. What about you—do you have a different personality in English?”

“Definitely not,” said Teacher Sun. She switched to English, just to prove it. Her vowels in English were all over the place, but she pronounced them with such gusto. “I’m the same person no matter what.”

I believed that. Maybe if you had a strong personality, it shone through any language barrier. But I wasn’t as forceful as Teacher Sun. I went wherever the language took me, and when I didn’t have language, I wilted.

Teacher Sun said that my project idea had promise and she was looking forward to hearing it, but she recommended adding in some anecdotes to give it a personal touch. On the day of the exam I would have seven minutes to present. I could use slides and notecards, but I was not to read my speech verbatim. I got full points if I could deliver the whole thing from memory. Then I would take one question from the crowd. Ideally, someone would volunteer a question. “The question could come from anyone,” said Teacher Sun. “So make sure your speech is interesting, so that people will want to respond to you.” She gave me a conspiratorial wink. “But I’ll prepare a question for you, just in case.”

I TOOK MY MIDTERMS: FOUR WRITTEN EXAMS AND A TWENTY-MINUTE oral interview scheduled during my lunch break. At four o’clock I stumbled bleary-eyed out of the department. I was not certain I had done well, and I was trying to decide how much to care.

What was I if not good at school? Education was the closest thing my family had to a religion. School was the way out. My father had learned algebra in a village schoolroom with mud floors and no running water or electricity. My mother put herself through the UC system on a full ride. Both had taught me the pleasure of analysis—of throwing my mind at a problem, staring at it until the pieces clicked. And it was all so easy for me; from kindergarten to my senior year, my report cards were flawless. I was the prodigy, the teacher’s pet. I did not just pass exams, I aced them. When I received my college acceptance letters, my parents screamed and then phoned my aunts and uncles so that they could scream too, even if they didn’t understand what all the screaming was about. From the village to America to Yale—I had made it; I was the end point, the promised land.

But what it led up to wasn’t curing cancer, or winning a Fields Medal, or running for president, or inventing the next Facebook; where it all ended up was a cubicle in the computer lab of the foreign languages department of National Taiwan University, mixing up characters my parents had learned to write when they were children, cobbling together compositions that their teachers would have laughed at, struggling in an oral interview to remember the term for “society.” And when I thought about it, this was such a devastating step backward that I wanted to hurl my textbooks into the street.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, TEACHER SUN ASKED ME IF I WANTED TO listen to the tape of my oral exam.

I asked if we had to. “It is probably best,” she said. “The examiners had a lot of notes.” She clicked through my folder and pulled open an audio file. “No one likes to hear their voice on tape, but you get over the discomfort quickly.”

The sounds coming out of the speaker astonished me. I had never listened to my own voice in Chinese before. From my perspective, the sound of my Chinese was just the sound of my English, dressed up and distorted. But from the outside, I struck myself as an intelligible, alien being. A foreign sensibility. I did not know this person. If I heard her speaking on the street, I would think she was a stranger. Teacher Sun was going on about words I had mispronounced, phrasings I’d mangled, all the chengyu that I had employed in the wrong contexts. I couldn’t pay attention. I was so enthralled by the recording, those syllables spilling effortlessly into the air.

I couldn’t believe it. I was not fluent enough to hear the flaws; to me, the person who was speaking sounded plausibly Chinese. I could imagine her walking through the suburbs, going to classes, laughing at bars with her friends. This other person, born in China, raised in Taipei, a native of these streets. She was not impossible. She could have been.

TEACHER CAI TOLD US IT WAS POSSIBLE THE CITY WOULD SHUT down for the next few days. It was typhoon season, which explained the constant downpours, but the weather reports indicated that a larger, more dangerous storm would soon make landfall in Taipei. So everything would probably be closed tomorrow, but we wouldn’t know for sure until the government meteorologists had issued their official recommendations.

Teacher Lin said that the meteorologists were trigger-happy and were always declaring a shutdown even when there was only some light rain.

Teacher Sun said I was to be very careful going outside. Typhoons crept up on you—the air seemed calm, until it wasn’t. One time her cousin was walking home during a typhoon, and a piece of scrap metal nearly put out his eye.

Lee, our landlord, also texted me and Anna a warning: There is a typhoon coming soon! Please stay dry and follow the government updates. This was followed by three wave emojis, a poop, and a prayer emoji. This was Lee’s way of reminding us not to flush toilet paper down the toilet.

THE NEXT MORNING THE SKIES WERE CLEAR, THE AIR HOT AND still as ever. I thought the storm must have passed us by, but when I woke up there was an email from the department: Class was canceled; we could stay home until the following Monday. This prospect was horrifying. I didn’t have anywhere to go or anything to prepare for, and I couldn’t wander around the city because there was a curfew. I hadn’t seen Anna for the past three days. I would have to keep my own company.

Time slowed to a trickle. I took a long, luxurious shower and shaved every visible inch of my skin. I went through every flash card in my deck, then studied ahead for the next day, and the day after that. At lunchtime I wandered outside for a chicken onigiri from 7-Eleven. I thought about stocking up, as my teachers had recommended, but nothing in the 7-Eleven looked appetizing enough to buy in multiples. I did buy some toilet paper, some soap, a candle, and a lighter, in case the power went out.

The storm reached Taipei late in the day. I’d always assumed that storms arrived like rolling stones: They came from somewhere; they had a direction. But throughout the afternoon, the storm center simply materialized over the city. Everything congealed, and it seemed that the atmosphere was proceeding through states of matter, gas to liquid to solid, until the humidity was nearly tangible. We were swallowed by the clouds. I could feel the charge in the air, the faint bitter of battery acid under my tongue, and though the winds were still silent it seemed that everything was rising in pitch, and it wouldn’t end until the skies split open and lightning hit.

ANNA RETURNED IN THE EVENING.

I straightened up. “Hi.” It came out in English; Chinese felt like an act.

“Hi.” She didn’t look bothered to see me. She had two grocery bags hanging on her arms. She elbowed the door closed, kicked off her shoes, and walked across the living room. “Did you stock up for the typhoon?”

“I forgot.”

“So what, you were going to starve?”

“I don’t know.” I gestured to the coffee table, at my unopened bag of 7-Eleven acquisitions. “I bought a candle.”

“Well, I stocked up.”

I helped her open the door to the kitchenette. “What did you get?”