Page 62 of Taipei Story

“I’m sure he did, but, well.” Teacher Sun shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t care? Or maybe they didn’t think it was a real wedding?”

“How did the bride’s family react?”

“Oh, they were saints! Never stopped smiling. In fact—you see this pattern?” She zoomed in on the bride’s mother’s skirt so that I could see the brocade. Symbols of marital bliss were stitched all over the cloth: phoenixes and dragons and kissing mandarin ducks. “Custom tailored,” said Teacher Sun. “They had special suits done for the whole family; they really wanted to impress. But then when they saw the groom’s parents had nothing to wear, they literally took the clothes off their backs. Look!”

She clicked through to a family picture. The bride’s parents, hands clasped and beaming proudly, were dwarfed on either end by two white giants in khaki shorts. The groom’s parents wore the embroidered suit jackets, which were so small on them that the sleeves barely came down past their elbows. The bride’s parents exuded such a dignified joy, their chests puffed out, chins lifted. Each clutched one of their daughter’s arms. Their grip was so tight—even zoomed out, I could see the veins popping in their knuckles.

“No one said anything?” I asked.

“How could they? On her wedding day?”

She clicked again: another selfie, this time with the bride and groom. I examined the bride’s face. She was a plain, kind-looking girl. Her face was half hidden by a swoop of schoolgirl bangs. She reminded me a bit of Jasmine—her evident desire to go unseen. Had she recognized the slight for what it was? I wondered. Had she cried after; had she fought with her new husband; had she uttered even a veiled insult to her in-laws; had she regretted the whole thing? Was she happy now? How did she feel about her baby?

“Do you think they’ll be happy?” I asked.

“Oh yes, he adores her. Things completely turned around for him after he met her. She’s the one who came up with the idea for their business, and she does all the client-facing work. She saved his life, honestly; I can’t even imagine where he’d be without her. And their kids will be dual citizens. That’s great. That means no matter what happens, they’ll have a place to go. I mean, if the mainland invades—ha ha. Anyway!” Teacher Sun closed the image files. “What were we supposed to do today?”

“My speech,” I reminded her.

“Right,” she said, and clicked back out into the general folder. I was amazed at how far down she had to scroll. There were folders dating back to the 2010s, which meant she had been at this program for over a decade. I wondered if she would tell any stories about me to future students, if the hot springs hand job would outlive my time in Taipei.

We reached my folder: Chen Li-Li. She clicked open my speech document. Once again, a sea of red. “It’s not bad,” she said. “But I think you are getting sloppy with your particles. Shall we go over again the three uses of de?”

AFTER CLASSES, ANNA AND I TOOK THE GREEN LINE TO THE SONGSHAN stop, walked two blocks, and then roamed around in circles until finally a maintenance worker let us inside a locked residential lobby, then pointed us to the elevator to the third-floor entrance of the Shanghainese restaurant we’d been looking for.

Yale had organized a banquet dinner for all its fellowship recipients in Taiwan that summer. Present were two professors from the East Asian Studies department; a representative from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education, which had funded our living stipends; and a few older people who, I gathered, were the wealthy alums who had sponsored our tuitions. Rayer was there, as well as a handful of graduate students who had come to Taiwan on research grants. I sat between Skipper and Anna. Across the table was JC, who had somehow secured a seat for Margrit, although Margrit was not affiliated with Yale in any way. There was a floral centerpiece on the table, and when I adjusted my chair, it blocked JC’s face completely.

The representative from the Ministry of Education made a toast congratulating us on our dedication to studying Chinese and maintaining the very special US-Taiwan relationship. Then we went around the table sharing one experience each of something that had left a lasting impact on us this summer. We spoke in English; not all the donors were fluent in Chinese. Rayer talked passionately about some print magazines she had found at the NTU archives, queer student publications that hadn’t been digitized and so were inaccessible from the States. She would need more grant money to come back and scan them in the fall. JC said he had liked learning to mold pineapple cakes at the Kuo Yuan Ye Museum of Cake and Pastry. Skipper told everyone about the boat models in the Evergreen Maritime Museum. I talked about the acoustics at the National Concert Hall, and the donors all agreed it was an underrated treasure.

The donors asked if we thought learning Chinese had meaningfully shaped our career trajectories. We all nodded, and then once again we had to go around the table and share our future plans for this language. The graduate students talked about their dissertations. Besides Rayer’s queer Taiwanese literature project, there were also projects on Cold War cinema and literary representations of conflicted ethnic Chineseness. JC said he was considering entering the foreign service. Anna said she was applying to intern for a multinational venture capital firm based in Shanghai next summer, which I had not known. I was impressed—everyone else was so certain about their futures! I admitted I hadn’t made such concrete plans, but I did want to work or study in Taipei in some capacity, so long as I could find the funding.

“You should sign up to teach English,” said Rayer, and the other graduate students agreed. There were always opportunities to teach English; room and board was covered, and the stipend was good. They recommended some programs that were always recruiting, programs they had done themselves.

I had already heard of these programs. I was starting to get advertisements in my inbox—it seemed that my presence in Taipei had put me on some mailing list that targeted bilingual undergraduates. The qualifications were suspiciously lax. You didn’t have to have special training in teaching English. You didn’t even have to have a bachelor’s degree—undergraduates could apply to teach at the summer programs. All you needed was a sense of responsibility, organization, and a love of adventure.

All my Chinese instructors had advanced degrees in foreign language pedagogy. I knew that Teacher Lin had written her master’s thesis on regional language patterns of American heritage speakers, which was how she knew I had grown up in the northeast the moment I opened my mouth. I had found her dissertation online, which she had written in both English and Chinese. But apparently, teaching English didn’t require any skills you had to train or develop. You just had to use your existing advantages: your innate comfort with colloquial English and, ideally, your association with Ivy League universities. The prestige was enough.

I told everyone that I did want to return, but I didn’t want to do that, necessarily. I would keep pondering the matter.

TIME WAS HURTLING FORWARD AGAIN. I WAS STARTING TO RECEIVE emails about the fall semester—notifications about course registration, reading lists, and move-in procedures. Some friends from high school wanted to go on a road trip along the coast of Maine before we dispersed to our various colleges. It was strange to remember that I had a life in the States, a life after Taipei, and that this was in fact my real life. I had a Zoom call with my roommates to talk through our housing arrangements. It was the longest conversation I’d sustained in English since I came to Taipei, and the longer we went on, the more I hated the sound of my own voice; my loose, duplicitous tongue. I spoke so quickly. I knew all these euphemisms: boundaries, relationship accommodations, equitable division of chores. I felt vaguely guilty when we ended the call, like I’d been unmasked. So Paolo was right after all. I hadn’t lied about anything, but I’d massaged my message, manipulated my phrasing to secure the friendliest reception. I couldn’t do that in Chinese.

My mother texted me and my sisters that our father’s birthday was on August 28 this year, and to please have our cards and presents ready on the day so that he wouldn’t get upset. My father celebrated his birthday according to his village’s farming calendar. But no one had ever taught us how to use this calendar. The standard deviation was astonishing. Sometimes his birthday was in late July; sometimes it was in mid-August. My father never told us himself which day it would be. He would always wait until late in the day, or the day after, and then send recriminating messages about how everyone had forgotten his birthday and how unloved this made him feel. We would protest that we didn’t know, and he would say we should have figured it out, and everyone was wrong but also everyone was a little bit right. Chinese parents loved playing games like this: punishing you for the things they never taught you.

MY THOUGHT AND SOCIETY CLASSMATES WANTED TO GO TO DINNER to celebrate the journey we had undertaken together. In the hallway, we had a frantic conversation about whether to invite Teacher Cai, whether it would be appropriate or whether it violated boundaries, until finally we shuffled as a group into the classroom and asked her to join us. She smiled but declined; she always ate dinner with her family. But she hoped we had a nice time.

We found a hot pot restaurant several blocks southeast of campus, an NTU student haunt that Shanhong had heard of from a friend of a friend. We ordered by marking up a laminated menu with felt-tip erasable markers. We could get any kind of broth, any variety of proteins we wanted, for less than five US dollars each. We picked four hot pot sets: the tomato broth, the wild mushroom broth, the pumpkin broth, and the seafood special. There were little dials under the table to turn the flames up and down, a buffet of sauces and toppings along the back wall, and a mini freezer of ice creams we could scoop by ourselves for dessert. We all agreed: the cost-performance value here was excellent.

Outside class, we were still unable to stop speaking in chengyus. “A restaurant both cheap and delicious is like a phoenix feather, or the horn of a unicorn,” said Yuxiu.

I agreed: “Great goods, low price.” 物美價廉.

The waiter came with pitchers to replenish our broth just as the pots began to fizzle and smoke. Liping exclaimed that he was 雪中送炭: like the Song emperor Taizong, who sent charcoal on a snowy day to his people in their time of need. But Shanhong declared he was more like the 及時雨, the timely rain that rescues parched crops.

Yuxiu asked a waiter to take a photo for us, and we crammed against the wall end of the booth so that we would all fit into the frame. It was an awful photo: dimly lit, the camera lens streaked with grease. The perspective was all off, so Shanhong and I, who were sitting closer to the camera, looked moon-faced, our arms like hams. Yuxiu texted us the file, and I saved it to my favorites album.

Where were we going next? We traded emails, social media handles, and summer itineraries. Shanhong would stay on at the program for another semester and then look for work in the city. Yuxiu was graduating after next year and would enter the Singaporean civil service. Liping was considering a semester abroad at Harvard, and I promised to house her for Harvard-Yale if she came. We agreed we had to stay in touch. We had survived the ups and downs of Thought and Society, and that bonded us like the brothers of the Peach Garden Oath. We had 風雨同舟: been in the same boat through wind and rain. We had 同甘共苦: shared the sorrows and joys of life together.

ANNA AND I STARTED COUNTING OUR LASTS. ONE LAST JOURNEY TO class. One last bowl of sweet tofu pudding from the Japanese stand on Yongkang Street: our classic order with ginger–brown sugar syrup, peanut crisp, and red beans. One last cup of bubble tea from 50 Lan. One last microwave spaghetti packet from 7-Eleven. One last can of Off! from the Watsons drugstore, and one last fist-size welt on my thigh on a day I’d forgotten to spray. One last lunch break; and on the final day of class, Anna texted me that she had found it: the onigiri shop, my white whale. I followed the route on Google Maps, and there it was, a little green restaurant with a takeout window. How could I have missed it? It was there all along, sandwiched between the burger café and the Vietnamese noodles place. I ordered one salmon roe onigiri and one tuna onigiri, and I didn’t even have to practice reading the characters off the board.