Page 7 of Taipei Story

The only excuse I could come up with was that I had felt like I couldn’t interfere. Like whatever happened in this city happened through a glass wall, and if we weren’t paying for it, we weren’t allowed to interact with it. All we could do was look.

“Holy shit.” Devin pulled out his phone. I turned to look. Across the square, an old man was carrying a boom box while walking beside his dog, who was riding a skateboard.

WAS I AN UGLY HUMAN BEING?

I had just read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place in a writing seminar that spring. It had made a great impression on me then, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it now. A tourist is an ugly human being, wrote Kincaid. An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.

But Kincaid was writing about British visitors to Antigua. By you, she meant the white European tourist descended from the enslaver. Our situation was different, surely. We did not have a colonial relationship with this place, did we? We had not come to gawk at natives, or dine at country clubs, or solicit the island girls, or enjoy private beaches inaccessible to the locals. We had come here to learn—to form a deeper relationship with this place. Surely Kincaid did not mean us.

But none of us were Taiwanese. None of us had family here. Most of us were here only because Taiwan right then was friendlier to American travelers than mainland China was, or we would have gone to Beijing, and in fact this was a source of great contention with my parents—that I had chosen the program farther from my extended family because I wanted to go where all my friends were going and I didn’t want to bother with downloading a VPN. I could go see my grandparents any other summer. I wanted to become Chinese here, on my own terms. The anonymity was the point—but that meant this place had nothing to do with me, that no cradle of belonging justified my missteps.

All this passed through my head every time we did something wrong, even by accident: when we failed to queue along the lines marked on the subway platforms; when we spilled bubble tea in the subway cars, which clearly prohibited eating or drinking; when we stood on the wrong sides of the escalators, blocking commuters racing for their trains; when we dropped plastic spoons, straw wrappers, and receipts on the ground and did not pick them up; when we took too long to order because we couldn’t read the menus; when we held up the line at the tofu pudding counter because we didn’t understand that the word for “spoon” here was 湯匙, not 勺子; when we stepped out in front of bicycles and mopeds without looking, and drivers swerved cursing around us. Did the locals tolerate us? Did they despise us? Did they think about us at all?

ANNA AND I HAD GRAND PLANS FOR MONDAY. WE WOULD GO FOR soy milk and fried dough sticks at the famous breakfast stand across the street. We would eat in the nearby Da’an Forest Park. We would sit at a cat café and make friends with an Instagram-famous fat tabby and get started on our readings for the week. Then we would go to the shopping plaza in Ximen, browse the pop-up accessory shops, and watch the street buskers until dinner.

Instead we slept. We were supposed to wake up at eight. Every time an alarm went off we fumbled around and did whatever it took to silence our phones. This cycle went on for hours. At one point I nudged the curtains aside, because daylight was supposed to help with resetting our circadian rhythms, but Anna moaned theatrically until I yanked them shut.

I couldn’t remember the last time I felt fatigue like this. It was so hard just to lift my arm. I could have stood up if I’d tried, but the amount of willpower that would have taken was immense. The distance between thought and action was Herculean. I imagined getting up and going outside—into the heat, the sun, the sticky mechanics of sunscreen and bug spray—and the thought made me wilt.

I was reminded of a novel I’d recently finished about colonial Africa. In the first chapter, a British soldier, one of the bad guys, arrives at his new post in his nice suit, wearing his medals; he’s a superior officer, he’s here to fuck people up. But the heat is stifling; he can’t even walk up the stairs. This seemed relevant to our situation. We were in foreign territory. We had invaded the tropics, and we had been defeated. It was late afternoon by the time we finally left the building, and that was only to go to the 7-Eleven around the block. Anna bought a pack of microwave spaghetti, and I bought a hot dog.

WAS THIS CULTURE SHOCK?

As part of our fellowship orientation, we had attended a mandatory information session about managing culture shock. Culture shock was the disorientation of encountering a new way of living. This could lead to stress and anxiety, feelings of hostility, frequent crying, changes in appetite, sense of failure, and a reluctance to associate with new people. If we felt culture shock, we were supposed to Stay Positive, Embrace the Process, and Keep an Open Mind.

I was aware that culture shock could happen, I just didn’t think it could possibly happen to me. Culture shock was for people teaching English in rural villages in Eastern Europe, where there was no internet or running water. Taipei was a first-world city. Taipei had Starbucks. Granted, I had never been here before, but I had assumed something in my constitution would protect me—like how babies inherit antibodies from their mothers. When I examined this assumption it was clearly absurd, but I had really taken that confidence into my first week in Taipei: that because I was already Chinese, this place would feel like home.

I REALIZED MY HEADACHES WERE COMING FROM THE STREET signs.

I never had to pause to decipher street signs at home. I didn’t have to think consciously about the act of reading at all: I just looked, and meaning was revealed. Here, text was a barrier to meaning, and I had to slow down every time I wanted to figure something out. I had never thought much about how the ability to read lubricated my daily existence. It felt natural to glance at signs and immediately discern which subway platform I needed, the way to the right exits, the opening hours of a coffee shop, the rules at the dog park. Here in Taipei, I glanced and expected to know, but didn’t. It was like having to do long division every time I opened my eyes. In my freshman philosophy seminar, we had talked about how human beings do not live directly in the real world but in an invented symbolic order. I understood now what this meant.

ANNA AND I MANAGED JUST ONE TASK THAT DAY: WE DRAGGED ourselves out to Uniqlo, just before it closed.

We had gravely miscalculated with our wardrobes. We had known Taipei would be hot, but not this hot. Even our most revealing outfits granted no relief. The issue was not skin exposure—which you in fact didn’t want, for the UV index was lethal—but weight: Fabric accumulated sweat and condensation throughout the day, and then it bunched up and chafed. We had packed many crop tops with tight elastic bands, and we had discovered that this guaranteed sore, itchy middles. The only materials we could wear in this climate were cotton and linen, the baggier the better.

At Uniqlo we skipped past the cute overalls, skirts, and peplum tops and headed for the basics at the back. I found some ankle-length cotton dresses at a three-for-two discount. They were all the same dress, just different colors: blue, black, and green-and-white. They had no waist, no shape, and no buttons. I would cycle between these dresses until the summer was over: one to wear, one to wash, and one to dry.

“I don’t get it,” said Anna. She was staring out the window at a trio of attractive Taiwanese women walking with linked arms down the street, all crisply dressed in dark pantsuits, not a hair out of place. “Don’t they sweat?”

TUESDAY CAME, THE DAY OF RECKONING. MY FIRST CLASS WAS Thought and Society with Teacher Cai: my bread-and-butter class, where I would learn the essential grammar structures and vocabulary appropriate for my language level.

All the classrooms on the third floor were tiny—offices, really, just large enough to cram in four desks and a blackboard. Our program prized itself on small classes: This way no one could drift off, and everyone got ample opportunity to speak. My language class at Yale had fifteen students in one room, and you could always sit in the back on days you couldn’t wake your brain up. Here we were all front and center, directly in the line of fire. That was the point. Constant vigilance! We could never turn our brains off. We might be forced to speak in Chinese at any moment.

Teacher Cai had us introduce ourselves. We were all girls, and all close to the same age. I wondered if this was by design. Shanhong was a recent university graduate from New Zealand. Yuxiu and Liping were undergraduates at the National University of Singapore. They had studied classical Chinese in school, and I envied their neat, tidy handwriting. We wrote our Chinese names on the board, and Teacher Cai said our names were excellent; very literary, very Chinese-sounding. She was thrilled about our class composition. “I like teaching girls,” she said. “Girls are better students. You all seem very attentive, very diligent.”

We beamed. We were, at the end of the day, good immigrant daughters.

“Since you are all heritage speakers, we won’t have to waste time with pronunciation.” Teacher Cai clapped her hands. “We will move a bit faster through the syllabus, if there are no objections. Usually we only get through six lessons in a semester, but I think we can get through nine or ten.”

We wanted to live up to her good impression of us, so we nodded. Yes, we could double the reading. Yes, we could add more homework. No problem.

Teacher Cai asked us to preview the table of contents. The Thought and Society textbook was a collection of essays on various aspects of modern Taiwanese life and culture. I was relieved that the titles, at least, were legible to me: “Health Issues Facing Modern People,” “Chinese People’s Views on Gods and Spirits,” “The Responsibility of College Students,” “On Written Text and Language,” “The Social Value of Old Stories,” “Special Characteristics of Chinese Thought,” and so on.

These were not very inspiring topics, but still I felt a bite of anticipation. I’d never been good at discussing social issues in Chinese. It was easier for me to recite an idiom about a woman whose beauty could devastate cities than it was for me to talk about history or politics. I got a mental block every time I tried to dig through those abstract nouns: society, economy, population, environment, government, policy, war, peace, history, socialism, communism, and so on. They were easy to generate, easy to translate, and many of the terms were built from the same characters. For instance, “society” was 社會, and “-ism” was 主義, and “socialism” was just 社會主義, “society” + “-ism.” So the problem wasn’t that the vocabulary was so difficult. The problem was that I couldn’t put the words in combinations that were interesting. All I could come up with were inanities. Governments enact policy. The population is shrinking. The population is growing. If I wanted to say more on an issue, I had to chain these blocks together to get to my point, but the thoughts never got any more complex. In my oral final last spring, I had been asked about the demographic pressures of an aging population, and I had responded:

Hmm.

This question . . . it is very difficult to say.