Page 9 of Taipei Story

“Yeah—sure!” I waved back, startled.

Tomorrow. He wanted to have lunch with me again. For once, I had said all the right things. I had passed.

I STILL HAD TWENTY MINUTES LEFT IN MY LUNCH BREAK, SO I went to the library and tried to get ahead on my reading for Modern Taiwanese Literature.

I always studied the vocabulary lists accompanying each page of text before I tackled the story itself. It was more efficient to make flash cards first, so I wouldn’t have to keep stopping to take note of unfamiliar terms. All I knew about this story was the title—“The Fish”—but the relevant vocabulary I knew to expect from the first page included:

悸動: to palpitate卡車: truck

臀部: buttocks魚鱗: fish scales

曼陀林琴: mandolin

Wow, I thought. Where was this going to go?

MY NEXT ELECTIVE CLASS WAS CONSIDERING THE NEWS WITH Teacher Shen.

I was getting tired of meeting new people, and I was relieved that both Yuxiu and Liping were in my news class as well. The fourth student introduced himself as Baodeng, which meant his English name was probably Ben or Brad. Baodeng was blond and blue-eyed and wore a Warriors jersey. He had been learning Chinese since he was ten because his parents thought it could help him in the business world someday. His accent was perfect, entrancing. Every time he spoke, I understood why my parents were obsessed with viral WeChat videos of white men performing pingshu. It was like watching a dog dance the salsa. Baodeng told us that he’d already made some Taiwanese friends through games of pickup basketball in the park, and I decided then that I believed in world peace.

We would spend four days on each lesson in the textbook. First, we would cold-read the text: 冷讀. Cold-reading meant we weren’t supposed to review the text before we read it out loud, but none of us was going to risk that. The worst feeling in the world was pausing in front of a character you didn’t know, begging for the instructor to rescue you with the answer. Indeed, when we did a practice cold read of the first article in the textbook—“On the Spread of Ebola in the Congo”—everyone was suspiciously well-prepared. Baodeng didn’t even get tripped up on the term “hemorrhagic fever.”

Next, we would each research an answer to one of the “Further Questions” at the end of the text and share what we had learned with the rest of the class. Teacher Shen had printed off some paper slips with formal phrases to use when discussing social issues with others. The more we could work these phrases into everyday conversation, the smarter we would sound. We read them out loud:

I could not agree more.

Indeed, it is so.

I emphatically disagree.

Just based on my personal experience, ______.

From a different point of view, ______.

In the final analysis, ______.

Our last order of business was deciding our reading list for the summer. The textbook was composed of real Chinese news articles from the past few years. The headlines fascinated me; they were so random and specific. One was “The City of Paris Declares War on Fat Shaming.” Another was “Bill Gates Reinvents the Toilet for Safer Sanitation.” And another: “Is Diabetes Self-Inflicted? Japan Finance Minister’s Remark Draws Criticism.” Teacher Shen told us the articles were selected to give us experience in as wide a range of vocabulary as possible. You never knew when you would need to discuss how “DNA Heritage Tests Might Bolster Racism.”

The textbook included sixteen such articles, too many to cover in ten weeks, so we went through and marked the ones that were of most interest. No one wanted to talk about the growing threat to food from the decline in biodiversity, but everyone wanted to read about how a Japanese women’s university had decided to accept transgender students.

MY LAST CLASS OF THE DAY WAS MY ONE-ON-ONE CLASS—MY PRIVATE tutoring session. The classroom was on the fourth floor, at the far end of the hall. I opened the door, and someone inside screamed, “Chen Li-Li! Enter!”

I walked in. “Hi—”

“Nice to meet you!” Teacher Sun was a tiny woman with deep laugh lines crinkling around her eyes. Her default volume was a scream. She didn’t seem hard of hearing—she had hawk ears for even my mumbles—but she loved to enunciate the exclamation point. I understood why they had put her at the far end of the hall. It was not just a matter of volume but one of pitch. Her voice was like an alarm siren, and I jumped every time she spoke. “Tell me about yourself!”

I went over the basics: that I had been born in Guangzhou, that my family had moved to the United States when I was young, that I had spoken Chinese as a child but had forgotten most of it and was now making a serious study of it as an adult.

“Ah, okay! So you have a good ear for tones, and you have an intuitive sense of grammar, but you need to practice your vocabulary and more complex ways to express yourself, is that right?”

I was amazed. No one had so astutely described my language level before. In high school I was always being placed in levels that were far below or far above my abilities. The heritage-speaker advantage led to a bizarre patchwork of near-fluency and shocking foundational gaps, but I never knew how to explain this, except by telling teachers, “I spoke a bit of Chinese at home.”

“I feel like I can hear what everything is supposed to be. I just don’t know how to say it myself.”

“Okay, I think I understand!” She got up and strode to the whiteboard. “Do you know what a resultative ending is?”

“No?”

“Do you recognize this pattern?”