Taipei Story (Deluxe Limited Edition)

Kuang,R. F.

N.T.U E-PROOF—not FOR SALE

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Author's Note

This novel uses Mandarin–English transliteration systems as its narrator, Lily Chen, encounters them. The majority of Mandarin names and phrases are transliterated using pinyin, since that is the system favored in Mandarin-language education in the U.S. I make exceptions for well-known Wade-Giles transliterations (for example, “Chiang Kai-shek” rather than “Jiang Jieshi”) or when Lily is consulting a resource that uses a different system (for example, “Chiung Yao” rather than “Qiong Yao”).

Taipei Story is a novel about getting things wrong: almost every encounter in the pages to follow features mistranslation, miscommunication, and misunderstanding. It especially plays with diaspora claims to authority and authenticity, and the ways Taiwan has been mythologized within both American and mainland Chinese hegemonic fantasies. Given the way other nations have tried to speak for and over Taiwan for much of its history, I hope that my work can serve as a stepping-stone for readers interested in reading about Taiwan from the pens of writers who call the island home. For authors who write about modern Taiwanese history and identity, I recommend Kaori Lai (Portraits in White), Bai Xianyong (Taipei People), Chen Yingzhen (Exiles at Home), Wu Ming-yi (The Stolen Bicycle), and Yang Shuang-zi (Taiwan Travelogue)—all available in English translation.

N.T.U E-PROOF—not FOR SALE

HarperCollinsPublishers

....................................

1

When I reached my gate at Logan Airport, I discovered there were a lot of Chinese American students boarding the United flight from Boston to Taipei with a layover in San Francisco.

In fact, I recognized one of them. We'd had some lecture classes together, and I was pretty sure her name was either Joyce or Jessica. I didn't know the others. But I knew they were Chinese Americans on their way to study Chinese in Taipei because it was the first week of June, when all the intensive summer language programs began, and because they were chattering about whether the layover was long enough, whether they would have to go through another security check, and whether they would have to re-check their bags before the next flight. They looked Chinese, but not Chinese Chinese. You could tell from the summer tans, the ruddy cheeks, the sun-browned hair. Chinese Americans always looked like Chinese people put through a broiler.

Two of them were clearly friends, and the rest seemed at least familiar with one another. One girl had a Harvard sweatshirt on, so I assumed they were all students from the area. Perhaps they were headed to Harvard Taipei Academy, a rival of the program I would be attending. They were now chattering about their bucket lists, which mainly involved food: the famous Taiwanese beef noodle soup, the black truffle soup dumplings at the original Din Tai Fung, the takoyaki and sizzling steak cubes at the Shilin Night Market, the roast chicken at Hawker Chan's.

These foods were also on my bucket list. We had read the same travel blogs. We were all headed to the same city to do the same things in the same little alleys.

This should not have surprised me, but it was strange to share an itinerary with so many students of my type, departing from the same airport on the same day, circumnavigating the world for precisely the same purpose. An hour ago, as I'd waved goodbye to my parents, I had felt grown-up, adventurous: Here I was, spending ten weeks in a country I'd never visited to learn a language I had long forgotten. I was on a coming-of-age journey to reconnect with my culture. As it happened, lots of students were on a journey to reconnect with their culture.

We boarded. The girl with the Harvard sweatshirt and one of her new friends were both seated in the row in front of me. They marveled at this coincidence and, naturally, began to flirt. He went to M.I.T. She went to, yes, Harvard. Did she know Priya? Priya, from Choate? Did he know Pete? Pete, from the film club? Yes, wow! The world was so small. He was touring Japan afterward; five days in Tokyo, five in Kyoto. She was going to the mainland to visit some relatives. “My grandparents live in Guangzhou,” she told him. “But I've never really spent time with them. Once I'm better at Chinese, I can really get to know them.”

My family was also from Guangzhou! I also wanted to get to know my grandparents! I almost leaned forward and tapped her on the shoulder to share this, but I thought about how I would feel if an eavesdropper tapped me on the shoulder to interject, and I kept quiet.

They discovered they had used the same Chinese language textbook that semester, and the boy started joking about one of the characters in the textbook, Wang Peng. Will Wang Peng get with Li You? Isn't Wang Peng such a Chad? The girl laughed, and I felt a sudden, intense dislike for these two. I knew them. I bet they were from the Bay Area. I bet they had grown up attending Kumon or Russian Math. I bet they'd joined Asian American affinity groups in college, where they had learned paper-cutting and tea-pouring techniques and practiced calligraphy on special mats that turned black under water instead of ink, so that their shaky, uneven brushstrokes disappeared as they dried.

I bet they wept at Ang Lee films and pretended to understand Wong Kar-wai films. I bet they gave their friends red pocket envelopes on Lunar New Year stuffed with cute little notes as if they were Valentine's Day cards. I bet they bought stale mooncakes at overpriced Asian delis for Mid-Autumn Festival, proof they kept up with ancient traditions. I bet they took selfies with these mooncakes and put them on Instagram, with captions copied and pasted from Google Translate: Chinese text！

The engines started, and I strained to follow the conversation. I wanted to hear them speak in Chinese so I could confirm that their tones were bad, that their vocabulary was strained—that they were fundamentally more Americanized, more corrupted, than I was.

But their Chinese was no better and no worse than mine. I had also used the Integrated Chinese textbook. I, too, knew Wang Peng. We were on the same itinerary so that we could fill in the same gaping lack, and the only thing that would resolve this was the passage of time—ten weeks in Taipei, immersed in our mother tongue—until we returned with perfect tones spilling out of our mouths, and we were no longer so bad at being Chinese.

Several weeks ago I had taken two virtual entrance exams to determine my language placement. One was a written exam, the other an interview. The written exam was structured so that the questions became harder and harder as I went on, but I was feeling okay until I reached the final section.

This was reading comprehension: four dense paragraphs of Chinese text, followed by four multiple-choice questions about their content. I always panicked at the sight of full paragraphs in Chinese. Alone, characters were eventually legible to me. Together, they formed this impenetrable Great Wall of meaning; the strokes ran together, and even if I approached the characters one by one, I couldn't decode them quickly enough to link their meanings.

I kept glancing at the timer. I had only eleven minutes left. My eyes darted around the first passage, trying to crack it open, but I could only make out random phrases.

It was a letter home from a university student to her parents. This I knew because it opened with the words “Dear Mom and Dad,” and it closed with “your daughter, Something-Something.” I was terrible with Chinese names. They were always composed of rare nouns that meant things like “plum blossom” or “incandescence”—nouns that I had no reason to have studied. Something-Something was doing fairly well this semester.

There was something about exams and winter break. Something about an open window. From there I lost the plot.

I skipped ahead to the questions. The first two were easy enough. Who was this letter from? A college student. What term was it? Winter term. The third question was: Why was her room dirty?

Why indeed? I tried again to extract clues from fragments within the passage. The window was open, and something had fallen off her desk. I guessed and chose the last answer: Because of a thief.

The next two passages involved motorcycles and birth control. I had no time to read the passages; reading the questions was hard enough. I chose answers based on common sense.

Why was traffic density a problem in Taipei? Because there were too many cars. Why were more Taiwanese women using birth control? Because having babies was expensive.

It occurred to me I could just paste the passages into a translation app, since the exam website had no anti-cheating protocol. But I resisted. I had to be honest about my weaknesses.

The final passage was written in Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese was to modern Mandarin as Latin was to English: No one spoke it colloquially, but quoting it made you sound smarter. I had long ago decided there was no reason for me to know, or ever use, Classical Chinese, and so I scrolled past those questions and hit submit.

The interview exam was conducted over video. I was nervous, although the whole point was to demonstrate what I didn't know so that they could teach me over the summer. I was certain that once we began they would discover I couldn't speak any Chinese at all, and that I would be revealed as a fraud, completely unteachable. I wanted to cram the day before, but I couldn't prepare in any meaningful way, because if I could teach myself an entire language overnight, then I wouldn't have to go to Taipei.

Everything was scheduled on Taipei time—the exam was at midnight for me. When I entered the virtual meeting room I saw a video frame of two women sitting at a desk. One was older and wore glasses; the other was younger and seemed friendlier. They introduced themselves respectively as Teacher Zhang and Teacher Huang.

“Tell us about yourself,” said Teacher Huang. She did all the talking throughout the interview. Teacher Zhang took notes and occasionally smiled without looking up.

“I'm a rising sophomore at Yale University, and I'm majoring in East Asian Studies.” I was able to say all this very smoothly, since I'd looked up the translations for “Yale” and “East Asian Studies” the night before. I had taped a small cheat sheet on my screen: translations for phrases like “heritage speaker” and “immigrated when I was a baby” and “non-Chinese environment” and “forgot all of my vocabulary because I never have a reason to speak Chinese.”

“What kind of classes are you interested in taking?” asked Teacher Huang.

“Classes?”

“Yes! We have a big variety of classes here. You can choose from electives on culture, history, literature, and film.”

“I like literature.” I nodded. “Literature!”

“Oh, good! Do you read Chinese literature?”

“I read Chinese literature.” I had read Chinese authors in English translation for a world literature seminar, and I hoped this counted.

“Who are some Chinese authors you like?”

Suddenly I could not recall the name of a single Chinese author I had ever encountered except Lu Xun, who did I not want to mention, because Lu Xun was widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature. Saying “Lu Xun” would be like saying my favorite English author was Shakespeare. At last I managed: “Zhang Ailing.”

“Oh, how wonderful! She's very well known in China. Can you say more about what interests you about her work?”

Now I was in trouble. We had gone off script. I wanted to say that I had read Zhang Ailing only in English translation, but that even in translation her descriptive power and insight into interpersonal relationships had floored me, and that I found her grayscale author photo in which she wore an elegant cheongsam both alluring and pretentious, that I had spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant to be a female author who wanted critical acclaim and also to look pretty. But I didn't know how to say any of that in Chinese.

Here were the terms I did know: “World War 2,” “Shanghai,” “city,” “relationships.” These were all keywords I understood to be generally associated with Zhang Ailing. I cobbled these concepts together with the grammar I had at my disposal while repeating that I found all this very interesting, very interesting. Teacher Huang and Teacher Zhang gave no indication whether this answer was good or bad.

“Do you have any other questions, or is there anything else you'd like to tell us?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Um, I . . .” I had wanted to tell them I was looking forward to the program, but in the moment, I forgot how to say “looking forward.” I didn't think I'd ever been taught how to say I was looking forward to something. Instead I said, “I'm very happy I can come to Taiwan. And study. Along with you.”

“We're very happy you can come too,” said Teacher Huang. She beamed and waved, wiggling her fingers. “Bye-bye!”

They left the meeting. I sat awhile at my desk, staring at my hands.

Anna was waiting for me outside the arrivals gate. She'd gotten in half an hour earlier on a connecting flight from Tokyo. We had long ago traded flight numbers, studied the terminal maps, and designated a rendezvous point, in case neither of us had cell service, and yet it seemed a miracle that we had reunited here on the other side of the world. We took each other in—rank breath, eye cheese, greasy hair—and giggled.

“You have to see the bathrooms,” said Anna. “They're the cleanest public bathrooms I've ever seen in my entire life.”

We bought tokens for the purple express train, which would take us from the airport to Taipei Main Station in half an hour. We had meticulously researched this route, had even watched a vlog of a traveler documenting the entire journey, but still it was a relief when the token stand did exist, the tokens cost what the internet said they would, and the purple train did come. We emerged aboveground and I saw an expanse of high-rises against hills blooming into mountains. I had read that Taipei was a city built inside a valley on an island, and this meant an abundance of rainfall. Everything was dewy all the time.

Taipei did not have the hard brilliance I associated with the tropics: no golden beaches, no vibrant blues. It was all a humid blur, mountains and forests shimmering under a wet patina of green.

Anna and I were the only tourists in our train car. No one else had such bulky suitcases, and no one else was gawking out the windows like they'd never seen a mountain before. I guessed they were commuters, or locals returning from short trips.

My chest tightened, and as I watched the hills rising and falling around us, I felt my eyes prickle. I didn't know how to make sense of this feeling. Could you be homesick for a place you had never been?

Anna and I had become friends because we sat next to each other in language section. The first thing I noticed about her was her laugh. She laughed every time someone made a goofy mistake, like when they said “horse” when they meant “mom,” or “prostitute” instead of “chicken,” or when they forgot to use the tense particle 了, so instead of saying “I did my homework,” they uttered a panicked “I do my homework!” It wasn't a mean laugh—it was adorable, a helpless titter, and most of the time she was laughing at herself. She had a round baby face, full of good intentions.

Her laughter freed up the whole class. You could take risks, you could make mistakes, because at worst it would make Anna laugh. I always paired up with her for group exercises, and we were always giggling so hard that we couldn't finish our assigned dialogues—like when I had to pretend to be her mother, disappointed by her report card, or when she had to confess she had a crush on my sister.

I did not know Anna well outside Chinese class. In fact, I was surprised to hear her voice at the airport. We had rarely spoken in English in person; since the semester ended, we had only communicated through texts and emails. But this felt for the best.

It would have been strange to come to Taipei with any other friends from my freshman year—the friends who knew my English self, my real self. Anna had only ever known me in Chinese. That meant I could construct an identity here, in front of her, and it wouldn't feel like pretending.

We had bought electronic SIM cards at the airport, and halfway between Taoyuan and Taipei, I began receiving a signal. I texted my family: Landed safely, on my way to the apartment. It was late at night for them, but both my parents responded within seconds.

Be safe, said my father.

Be very careful and drink only filtered or bottled water, said my mother.

Jasmine, my older sister, did not respond; she never responded to anything in the family chat. But there was a text from my younger sister, Flora. Did you make it?

This was a concession. Flora and I had fought before I left. I'd already forgotten the inciting incident—likely something stupid, like whether she had stolen my favorite pajama shorts—but it had blown up into an apocalyptic exchange. Flora hadn't come to the airport, and I hadn't said goodbye to her. I knew I had left her in the middle of a family meltdown, the sort we had every few months. I knew that she was scared of being alone more than she was angry. And I felt guilty about it, but not enough to cancel my trip.

Yes! I sent her a picture of the hills.

Nice, she wrote. Are you going to see grandma and grandpa?

I felt a twinge of annoyance. Not on this trip.

Isn't it like really close?

It's hours away. And I don't have a visa for the mainland.

A pause on Flora's end. Then: Just feels weird to fly all the way there and not go.

But she knew I didn't have a visa. She'd been there for that fight. She was only asking to be cruel. I didn't respond, and she didn't text me again.

We changed to the red line at Taipei Main Station. Here we bought subway passes—I.C cards—and loaded them up with money, a process that took longer than I felt it should. You couldn't buy cards at the machines, you could only refill them, so we had to ask a man in a kiosk window, but he only took cash, and so we found an ATM and took turns withdrawing money, guarding each other's backs just in case we were mugged. I had picked up this habit from my mother. It didn't matter what city you were in: Any ATM was a place where you might be mugged. It cost N.T$10 for the card itself, and then we had to add transit value. We consulted: N.T$60 seemed a good place to start. The exchange rate was N.T$30 for U.S$1, so that was twenty dollars on a metro card, and that seemed like a reasonable amount to spend in a month.

I was getting in the habit of dividing everything by thirty. Anna and I had both received funding from a Taiwanese government program that encouraged foreign students to study Chinese at local institutions, which meant our fellowship money was to be disbursed in Taiwanese currency, but that didn't matter. I could grasp the value of things only through conversion to the dollar.

The metro system was amazing. Clean glass walls partitioned the trains from the platforms. Everyone queued politely along double lines painted on the ground. Lights counted down in five-second increments the time until the next train's arrival, never more than five minutes away, and on the very second, the red line train toward Xiangshan glided smoothly onto the platform.

We got off at Dongmen station. We dragged our bags up the stairs and out exit 6, as our landlord had instructed us, and emerged onto the bumpy sidewalks of Yongkang Street. Open shop fronts offered shaved ice with fruit syrups, bubble teas, noodle bowls, sliced dragon fruit, whole bushels of lychee and longan, steamed pork buns, nougat cracker sandwiches, scallion pancakes. The offerings astounded me. This was not like New Haven, where everything you needed was locked behind glass; here it was all in the open air, pushed out in front of you, prices written out on hanging wooden placards. You didn't need to know the words; you could just point. Three employees at the same store tried to give me samples of freeze-dried strawberries, and I wished I knew a more colloquial response than “No want—no want—thank you.”

Lee, our landlord, was waiting for us outside a coffee shop, as promised. Our apartment was in the unmarked complex next door. He led us upstairs, and the moment he unlocked the door, we saw that we had made a terrible mistake.

Anna and I had chosen this short-term rental after weeks of reading travel blogs, fiddling with our budgets, and combing through apartment listings throughout the city. Our program offered several housing options, but those dorms were expensive and filled entirely with foreign students. We had decided to live in a hip neighborhood and save some money. We didn't want to come all the way to Taiwan just to be sequestered among Americans.

We saw now that the photos on the rental site had cleverly disguised a tiny studio as a spacious one-bedroom. The bed sat behind a lattice frame—that was the bedroom. The couch that had looked large enough for eight was actually just a two-seater, too short to sleep on unless you drew your knees up to your chest, and was wedged so close against the coffee table that even sitting, you had nowhere to put your legs.

The bathroom was clean, at least, but tiny. The showerhead was positioned directly over the toilet, and this was why the toilet paper dispenser was protected by a metal guard. “Everything gets wet when you take a shower,” said Lee. “I have some plastic bags if you need to keep any items dry.”

We were not to flush used toilet paper. Lee stressed this point again and again. The pipes were very old and easily clogged.

This was true of most bathrooms in the city. Taiwan was not like America. If we flushed toilet paper, the toilet would clog up and might even flood the entire building. “Please, please, please.” He put his hands together as if praying. “Don't forget.”

The kitchenette and washer-dryer machine were tucked into a narrow outside terrace walled in by thick iron slats. This kept the cooking fumes from getting into the building. “Don't close the door if you're alone,” he warned. “It locks automatically, so you'll be stuck up here until someone on the street calls the police.”

Lee showed us how to connect to the Wi-Fi, where the trash bags were, where to fill our water bottles, and where to dispose of our garbage. There were three waste compartments: trash, recycling, and used toilet paper. He asked if we had any questions, and we said no, and then he left.

Anna and I paced the room and consulted.

We were both a bit let down by Lee but didn't feel that we could demand a refund. He had been so nice to us over WhatsApp. He had checked in every day the week before our arrival and had even offered to arrange taxi transfers for us. He addressed us over text as either “My dearly beloved guests” or “Dearest Anna and Lily,” and he ended every message with several heart emojis. At this point Lee felt like family.

What to do? We had both spent the past year sleeping in long twin beds in close proximity to roommates we didn't particularly like, and that forced intimacy had made us more protective of our privacy. Sleeping in the same bed, walled in by the screen, showering over our toilet—it all seemed too much.

“I guess Asian cities just have less space,” Anna reasoned. “It'd be like this anywhere.”

“And we won't be spending much time here,” I said.

“Right, we just need a place to sleep.”

We decided we would try sleeping together in the bed, and if this bothered us, then one of us would move to the couch. We could then alternate who got the couch and the bed. We'd manage. This would help us build character.

Our parents, attending university in China, had slept in tiny bunks in rooms that fit six, eight, ten. Our parents had survived Communism. Couldn't we be so resilient?

The next morning we studied the bus schedules, caught the 278 bus from Wende Station to the Fuxing S. Road stop, and walked another ten minutes to National Taiwan University.

Our program was on the third floor. There was another Chinese summer program on the second floor, but I'd never heard of it. It was not one of the programs approved by our university fellowship office. Everything about this program seemed less serious.

The walls were covered with big, bright posters of basic Chinese characters like 好 and 日 and flyers depicting students waving and smiling in a field. They were all wearing basketball shorts. They looked too happy.

We continued up the stairs. There were no posters on the third floor. A television hung above the lobby displaying a daily chengyu, a four-word Chinese idiom. Today it read Chinese text, which meant “the sea of learning has no limits.” I understood this was meant to encourage us, but it felt like a threat. This was precisely how I felt about learning Chinese. I was always drowning in what I didn't know.

We thought we were early to orientation, but the main lecture room was already full, and we had to squeeze deep into the rows of desk-chairs to find two empty seats.

“Hi, Lily!”

It took me a moment to recognize the boy sitting beside me. It was Skipper Leys. I knew his face; it was just so unexpected in this context. I hadn't known Skipper was studying Chinese. He lived in my residential college, but we weren't close. I didn't know anyone who was close with Skipper, since the consensus was that Skipper was a bit of a weirdo. He had unnervingly straight posture, he didn't blink when he spoke, and he wore a sports jacket everywhere, even to the dining hall. His main personality trait was that he was in R.O.T.C.

I asked him how he was. “My summer has been very interesting.” Skipper never used contractions. He had already completed a three-week research internship with a scholar at Harvard who was famous for applying the Thucydides Trap to Sino-American relations. The theory went like this: America was a declining power, China was a rising power, and so just like Sparta and Athens, the two nations were destined for conflict. Skipper intended to work in air force intelligence after graduation, so he had come to study Chinese in Taiwan, which he believed was America's most important ally in the Asia-Pacific. Skipper believed we had to prepare for war to break out over Taiwan by the end of the decade.

There were several factors keeping China at bay for now. It was logistically difficult for China to mount a ground invasion, since a mountain range protected all of Taiwan's most densely populated zones. And Taiwan was home to the world's most valuable semiconductor manufacturers—it had a “silicon shield”—so China would not risk damaging those assets through a bombing campaign.

Also, the P.L.A-that was the People's Liberation Army, Skipper explained—would first have to cross the Taiwan Strait to land ground troops on the island, and they couldn't easily cross the strait, because America had warships parked right there. Still, this detente would not hold for long. The writing was on the wall; we had to get ready.

Did I have any family in Taiwan or on the mainland? My grandparents? Too bad—I might want to think about relocating them to the States. He had connections to state congressmen if I needed help with visas.

All this Skipper conveyed in hot, urgent whispers, just before a teaching assistant came to the front of the room and began going over the program's attendance policy.

“The most important rule of our program is the language pledge,” said Teacher Xu. Teacher Xu had been the program director for more than a decade, and her greatest joy in life was helping students unlock the beauties of the Chinese language. “Speaking anything but Chinese within the department is strictly forbidden. If you have to take a phone call, then go outside. If you want to speak to your friends in English, then you need to step down to the second floor. We have a three-strikes policy.

After two warnings, you will be asked to leave the program. Does everyone understand?”

We nodded. Teacher Xu continued. “You have probably heard that this program is famously intense. Here, we will not Chinese text. Does anyone know the meaning of this idiom?” No one raised a hand. Teacher Xu explained: It meant simply that we would have to work hard.

We would not be put out to pasture like cows to munch on grass at our leisure. They would make us earn our grass. The metaphor did not extend this far, but I had a sudden vision of our class plodding through fields of grammar and vocabulary, chewing it up, digesting it through four stomachs.

We would not have to write out characters by hand—we could type all our homework assignments. There was a collective sigh of relief. Someone actually cheered. This was the worst part of learning Chinese: spending hours sketching characters over and over again until the muscle memory was etched in my brain. Over my freshman year, I had filled reams of printer paper with what my roommate called “chicken scratch.” Long after I learned to recognize characters on sight, I still struggled with writing them.

Often I was trapped in the hazy space of knowing how a character ought to look and knowing the precise sequence of brushstrokes it took to get there. I often felt that my Chinese would progress in leaps and bounds if only I didn't have to keep writing characters like Chinese text and Chinese text, and I was so happy these teachers agreed.

“Learning to hand-write characters takes up too much classroom time,” said Teacher Xu. “Also, it can be hard for the teachers to read your writing. Everyone uses the computer to type characters now, and plenty of native Chinese speakers can't hand-write characters either. So we think as long as you can recognize them, you will be fine.”

She walked us through the syllabus. We would take an oral and written midterm in mid-July. We would take a final exit exam before we received our graduation certificates. We would also give a final presentation: We would have to write and memorize a speech at least ten minutes, or one thousand characters, long, and deliver it in front of the entire faculty.

We would have options to go on group trips to Jiufen and Maokong, and we would receive more information about that later. These would cost extra, and there were limited spots. They weren't mandatory. This program wasn't a cultural experience; it was chiefly about the work.

“And that's how things are.” Teacher Xu clapped her hands together. “We recognize the homework burden is quite heavy, but we are confident that you can meet the challenge. We trust you are here because you want to improve your Chinese. If you want a more carefree experience this summer, then you can go enroll on the second floor.”

This was the second time she had invoked the second floor. The message was clear: We could have fun this summer, but then we would be illiterate.

After orientation, we split into two groups: Half of us lined up to register for student I.D's, and the other half set off for a guided tour of the campus.

“Oh my gosh,” Anna whispered, but in Chinese, so that it sounded like Oh my heavens! “Look, it's J.C.”

I peered around the queue. There he was—hunched over the registration desk, tapping his pen against his forms. Even from behind, I knew him by his height, the loose dark curls at the nape of his neck.

John Cahan-Song was famous. We were good at ignoring famous people at Yale. In my residential college alone there lived a former Olympic gymnast, the heiress to an oil dynasty, and a child actress who had recently been killed off on her network show. You could search images of these people on your own time or read their profiles in The Cut, but if you sat across from them in the dining hall, you still had to pretend you didn't know who they were. Of course, we were hyperaware of them—we always knew who they were, and what they were up to. I knew for instance that J.C kept a lavender diffuser in his dorm room, that Luca Guadagnino was his favorite director, and that he walked girls home after they'd had sex, but only if it was after dark.

J.C wasn't famous on his own merits but because of his mother, Lydia Cahan-Song, a professor of linguistics who had risen to fame for a Ted Talk followed by a bestselling memoir about how she had raised her children to speak five languages with near-native fluency. She and her husband spoke only English and Chinese, so they had hired two au pairs: one from France and one from Sweden, who between them spoke German, French, and Italian. J.C's older sister, Justine, a first-year in the law school, was notoriously beautiful. The siblings were all over TikTok. They did a recurring bit where they would begin an argument in one language and segue seamlessly to another, going around the world while little flag emojis popped up in the background.

I wasn't inordinately obsessed with the siblings; the algorithm just kept pushing them at me. I would be mindlessly scrolling on my phone, and suddenly there they were. I had watched J.C crooning a French lullaby to a bunny rabbit more times than I dared admit.

But even John Cahan-Song had to work on his Chinese! This comforted me. It put us on equal footing. So even the TikTok famous could not munch on grass in the pasture.

The tour was led by a recent college graduate named Cassidy. Cassidy had attended the program for several semesters as a student, and now she was living her dream: helping other people on their journeys through Chinese.

Cassidy told us that National Taiwan University had been built in the 1920s by the Japanese colonial government but was renamed and reestablished as a Chinese institution after Japan's defeat in World War 2. As we walked I tried to work out what made NTU look so distinctly Asian to me. Perhaps it was the lotus pads floating atop the Drunken Moon Lake, or the enormous palm trees ringing the central boulevard. Or the names of the dorms—here they were called things like Women's Fourth Dorm and Men's Eighth Dorm, instead of being named after dead slave owners. Or the enormous bike stands on every other block.

I had never seen so many bikers on a college campus. They dipped in and out of the spacious bike lanes, texting while riding, riding with no hands.

Cassidy walked us past a noodle stand, a snack shop, and a farm store (N.T.U's agricultural department was famed for its cows, and we were encouraged to come try the ice cream sandwiches) and then led us through the student center. This was a good option for lunch, Cassidy told us; the food was very cheap, and not as bad as it looked. There was a bakery, a dumpling kiosk, a bubble tea kiosk, and even a pay-by-weight vegetarian buffet where we could scoop our own bowls of rice out of a massive cooker. There was no air-conditioning, despite the sweltering heat.

Enormous box fans hummed from every corner. Taiwanese students sat hunched over the tables, glaring at their textbooks.

Outside, we clustered around a tall metal structure: four poles stretching to the sky, then dipping down to support a bronze bell. This was the Fu Bell, named after one of the university's former presidents. “President Fu was beloved on campus,” Cassidy told us. “Once, during the martial law period, after a student protest, the government sent officers to raid the campus for Communist sympathizers, and Principal Fu refused to let them through the gates. He said this was a place of learning, not politics. If they injured any students, then he would fight them himself.”

Someone asked Cassidy if there were a lot of Communist sympathizers during the Cold War, and Cassidy blinked at him like he was stupid. “I mean,” she said. “Mainland China's like, right there.”

I sent some pictures of the campus to my parents. I wasn't sure what mood they were in, but they could usually be coaxed out of a bad spell by talking about academia. They'd been so excited when I was accepted to the program. National Taiwan University was apparently very prestigious—it was like the Harvard of Taiwan. My father asked if I had made any connections yet with the students or professors. Not really, I texted back.

All of my classmates are exchange students. And the language teachers aren't full professors, they're just instructors. This was confusing because in Chinese, you used the same appellation for teachers regardless of whether someone was a tenured professor or a ski instructor: Chinese text.

My father suggested I sit in on some physics lectures, if I had the time. My mother wanted to know if all the teachers were Taiwanese.

I think so, I wrote.

That's okay, said my mother. Just don't pick up a Taiwanese accent.

I asked her what was wrong with a Taiwanese accent. Nothing, she texted. The Taiwanese accent is fine, it is very gentle. A moment passed, and then she wrote, Please don't lose your Beijing accent.

My college language instructor was a woman from Beijing. Over my freshman year I had slowly adopted her pronunciations, and these had delighted my mother: my pert, crisp syllables, the way I added the er sound randomly at the end of every other word. I gathered that the Beijing accent was like the Queen's English. It was a little grating, but it signaled that you had class, that you were better than other people.

“You're starting to sound like Auntie Sharon,” my mother liked to say. This was a compliment. Auntie Sharon was my mother's best friend from church. Most of my mother's church friends were Cantonese or Fujianese. Auntie Sharon was the only one from Beijing, and she was widely recognized as a lady with style. After Sunday services, she liked to take me aside and show me photos from her most recent vacation to Europe. She always stood before famous landmarks in the exact same pose: her feet arranged in the ballet third position, her arms lifted daintily at her sides, her thumbs touching her index fingers. Auntie Sharon spoke exclusively in Chinese, except when she switched in the middle of a sentence to use her favorite English phrase: “Not my cup of tea.”

People who were not Auntie Sharon's cup of tea: the substitute pianist (who dressed too casually), the youth pastor (whose teeth were too white), her son Benji's new wife (who was from Shanghai, and “fresh off the boat,” and did not treat Auntie Sharon with the appropriate amount of respect).

The Taiwanese accent, by comparison, was famously friendly. I had seen a viral video where an influencer from Beijing was moved to tears on a flight to Taipei because her flight attendant was so sweet. But my mother didn't want me to adopt this accent. She was afraid that sounding too gentle would set me back in life. She wanted me to learn to sound mean and rich. Then my opportunities would be boundless.

After the tour we returned to the office to collect our textbooks. We had a choice between reading Traditional or Simplified characters. As I understood it, mainland China used Simplified characters because Chairman Mao, a Communist revolutionary, believed that illiterate peasants could be raised from the shackles of ignorance only by stripping the language of its unnecessary brushstrokes. Meanwhile Hong Kong, Taiwan, and many other diaspora Chinese communities still used Traditional characters, because they refused to erase thousands of years of history and culture, and because they hated the Communists.

I could read both writing systems, so I chose Traditional. I didn't have a good reason. It just seemed harder, and I had always felt there was some virtue in choosing the harder path, at least when it came to school.

I stepped into the hallway and flipped through each volume. New textbooks always gave me a little masochistic thrill. I liked the weight of them. I liked previewing all the things I didn't know.

It made me excited about the amount of work to be done—the hours I would spend throwing my mind at these walls of text, breaking them down to comprehension. It felt like a promise. By the time we were finished here, I would be able to read everything in these books. All that weight would go inside my head.

That night in our apartment, Anna and I spoke only in Chinese to each other. We had decided that we should obey the language pledge even when we were at home for a fully immersive experience. If we didn't remember the term for “shower” or “laundry machine,” then we would have to look it up, and this would force us to build our vocabularies over time.

After an hour of this, I wanted to smack her. It wasn't anything Anna said but the way she said it—delicate, mincing, somehow both naive and passive-aggressive at once. She pitched everything at least an octave higher in Chinese, and it actually hurt my ears. I had never felt this way about her in class. But when we weren't role-playing or reading from a textbook, when she was just being herself, I couldn't stand her. In Chinese, Anna was a pouty baby.

How could I broach this without being an asshole? I tried: “You know, your personality in Chinese is different.”

Anna frowned. I knew she wanted to say, How so? But she didn't know how to phrase that, so what came out was “What are you saying?”

I wanted to respond You sound like a spoiled brat and your voice gives me a headache. But I didn't know any of those words, so I said, “You're like a little child. Your voice—it is higher.”

“You're different too,” said Anna. “You become . . .” She reached for her phone. She typed something into her dictionary app, then announced, “Docile and uncertain.”

We both fell quiet. Was she also thinking of her parents?

We had a long weekend off before classes began the next Tuesday. A group chat of Yalies had materialized: me and Anna, Skipper, two other students from our freshman year section—Devin and Belinda—and J.C. None of us had been to Taipei before, but we had all received the same travel advice, and we were agreed on what we had to do first: explore the monuments at Liberty Square, go to the National Palace Museum, eat at a night market, and take the elevator to the top of Taipei 101. Some of our tips sounded like fairy-tale quests. At sunset, walk to the base of Elephant Mountain, look for the shop with the red lanterns, and find the vegan beef noodle soup made with monkey's head mushroom. But these were well-trod paths. Without fail, the vegan noodle soup did appear.

There emerged a pecking order of cultural authority that had something to do with language placement level but more to do with assumptions about race: At the bottom were Devin and Skipper, who were white; then Belinda, who was Chinese but adopted; then J.C, whose accent was suspiciously bad, though he should have been a native speaker. Anna and I were at the top, and so we became the default authorities on Taipei. Neither of us had ever been here, but we had been on family trips to the mainland, and that was supposed to be close enough. This meant we called the shots: We interpreted when the others couldn't understand; we decided which train lines to take and which restaurants to eat at; and we explained the local customs to others, although most of the time we were just relaying Google search results. Sometimes I would sneak to the bathroom just to look something up on my phone—I liked having all the answers.

We made a pilgrimage to the original Din Tai Fung, the soup dumpling empire that now had branch locations across the world. We showed up beneath the distinctive red neon characters at six, which we thought was early for dinner, and found a line curling around the block. But we didn't wait long—the place was enormous. The little storefront concealed an underground labyrinth stretching across two floors, and as we were led to our seats, we passed glass walls through which we could watch chefs wrapping those famously precise soup dumplings: eighteen folds, twenty-one grams each.

We nodded intently as our waitress taught us the ideal way to enjoy a soup dumpling: We were to taste it first without any sauces, savoring its natural flavors, then dip it in a mixture of three parts vinegar, one part soy sauce. We ordered one basket of every kind of dumpling. We treated each bite with orgasmic reverence, moaning when we bit the tops off and the broth exploded into our mouths. “Holy fuck,” said the woman at the next table over, in English. She said this at regular intervals, every time she tried another dish. “Holy fuck!” J.C wanted to know how they got all that soup inside the dumpling, and at least three of us shouted the response, because we had seen it in a video, an article, a documentary—it's a jelly when they wrap it; they chill the broth with gelatin powder until it's solid, and then it melts again when it's steamed.

We got our bill, and we laughed at the total. We paid less than the equivalent of twenty U.S dollars per person. This same meal at the New York location would have cost us hundreds. We felt giddy; we thought we'd been let in on a wonderful secret.

Was there a superior soup dumpling, somewhere, in a lesser-known dive? Who cared?

At the National Palace Museum, we headed straight for the centerpiece exhibits: the Jadeite Cabbage and the Meat-Shaped Stone. These were exactly what they sounded like: a piece of green-and-white jadeite carved to look like a napa cabbage and a piece of layered-brown jasper carved to look like a cube of pork belly, a thick slab of jellied fat over stringy meat. Clearly everyone knew to see these exhibits first; dozens of visitors were lined up around the hall, and everyone waited patiently so that one by one we could take pictures making peace signs against the glass. The Jadeite Cabbage was too shiny to pass off as a real cabbage, but the Meat-Shaped Stone was scarily convincing. I could just feel the squish of fat between my teeth.

Anna had learned that next door was a restaurant where we could order dishes that looked like the statues that looked like the dishes. We pondered whether to go for lunch, but there was another long line outside the front, and it seemed like a lot of trouble just for some cabbage.

In the lobby, a tour guide shepherded a group of Americans toward the ticket booths. “When the Nationalists were losing the Chinese Civil War, they packed some of their best artifacts in crates and had them shipped to Taiwan,” said the guide. “The idea was that as long as they held claim to the nation's cultural heritage, they retained legitimate claim to power. Of course, that's silly, but many still believe that though the Communists might rule the mainland, China's soul lives here. After the Cold War, and especially after the Cultural Revolution, many mainlanders would come to Taiwan to visit the culture that they had lost.”

So it wasn't just me; so everyone was here to seek a bit of the motherland.

We wandered into an enormous shopping complex where we found Eslite, Taiwan's largest bookstore, open twenty-four/seven and spanning eight floors, where you could buy anything from a desk lamp (level B1) to an aromatherapy kit (level 5F). Our Chinese was not yet good enough to make sense of the book titles. We lingered a bit in the Foreign Languages section, but without much interest; it felt silly to buy Anglophone books in Taiwan. Most of the books were shrink-wrapped, anyhow; this way we could not read them without buying them. We purchased stationery instead: erasers shaped like bunnies, notebooks shaped like hamburgers, and gel pens with pom-poms with silver bells that tinkled when you wrote.

There were pocket almanacs at the checkout counter that told fortunes according to the lunar calendar. We riffled through to June. Today was good for asking for blessings, tailoring, starting a business, and raising beams. Today was bad for dismantling altars, putting on mourning clothes, and the maiden voyage of a boat.

Skipper bought a cotton smock from a vendor on the street. The vendor told him that this smock had been designed by his daughter, who was studying fashion design in Paris. It was the same fabric used by luxury brands—Gucci, Prada, they all sourced this fabric from the same factory. It would get softer with every wash and keep him cool all day long. Skipper put it on, and for the rest of the day we called him White Jesus.

We made our way to the Ningxia Night Market when the sun had set and it was cool enough to bear the thought of eating outside. We decided we would walk through the stalls and peruse everything on display before we made our purchases. We were trying to be judicious—we didn't want to buy the first things we saw. But everything was so cheap, we could try it all for mere cents a serving: enormous vats of cold watermelon juice; takoyaki balls sizzling in their molds; teriyaki steak cubes; hand-pulled noodles; deep fried sesame balls stuffed with taro and pork floss; grilled squid; deep-fried squid; skewers of spiralized potatoes, lifted fresh from a vat of bubbling oil.

We found the stinky tofu stand: This was legendary, obligatory. We all pinched our noses, tried one piece each, and agreed it was not so bad. Skipper insisted he didn't find it stinky at all, but he didn't go back for seconds. We found a stall selling oh-chien, Taiwan's famous oyster pancakes.

I was able to explain why they were famous, because I had researched it the night before: They were invented by the rebel general Koxinga, who fried oysters and potato starch to save his men from famine during a campaign against the Dutch. We agreed the oyster pancakes were just okay—a little slimier than we'd like. They probably tasted great if you were starving on a beach.

We piled into a shaved ice café chiefly because it had plastic chairs and air-conditioning. J.C crushed two bottles of water in under a minute. At the next table over, a group of white tourists were oohing and ahhing over their trays. They had never tried tapioca balls before—they were holding them up to eye level like exotic specimens. “Mouthfeel,” they kept saying, while making faces. “What a unique mouthfeel!” I caught Anna's eye, and we giggled.

“Q.Q” was the word. I had read several essays about this. Q.Q was that springy, chewy mouthfeel: not quite rubbery, not plasticky, not artificial, but wholesome, almost cute.

Q.Q was squishy cheeks and bouncing mascots; was bubble tea, aloe vera jelly, and glutinous rice balls. A taste for Q.Q was like an ear for tones: Either you were lucky and born with it, or you could try very hard to acquire it, with uncertain results. This was a silly reason to feel superior to other tourists, but in that moment I did. I had a right to this place, and they didn't, because I liked gummy things.

In the morning, we gorged on fresh fruit from the stand across the street: enormous white peaches, golden mangoes, crisp Asian pears, tangerines that shed their skins with the barest tug. We bought a bushel of rust-red lychees the size of our palms, which exploded with juice so sticky that we could only eat them outside in the park, hunched over plastic bags to catch the drips, and even so, it took just minutes for ants to form hopeful lines around our feet. I had never tasted lychees like this in the States. Those brown, shriveled things you could only find three months of the year at 99 Ranch Market—they did not compare.

I had fuzzy memories of tagging behind my grandmother at a park in Guangzhou, begging for one more piece. But she always said no, because lychee was full of “fire,” and so much fire would be bad for me. I'd never known what that meant, though now I felt a sear in my throat when we finished the bushel. I'd cracked the code. Could fire symbolize inflammation?

Dragon fruit was the best: a perfect mix of sweet and sour; thicker on your tongue than watermelon, still so soft you could scoop it out with a spoon, or even better, cut it into wedges and peel the skin while you chewed. Dragon fruit came in white, yellow, or purple, but the purple dragon fruit were like dye canisters. I discovered this in the bathroom—when I wiped, the tissue came away looking like I'd colored it with a marker. I stared into the bowl.

The water looked radioactive. Black seeds floated at the top, undigested, coated in slime. I almost called for Anna to come and see. But I didn't have my phone, and I didn't know the Chinese for “pigment.”

We learned that Taipei 101 was the eleventh-tallest skyscraper in the world, and had been the tallest skyscraper when it was built in 2004, before it was overtaken by the Burj Khalifa. We could see it from any point in the city—when we climbed Elephant Mountain and everyone lost signal, we used it to find our way back into town. “It looks like takeout boxes,” said Skipper. “Is that racist to say? It looks like eight Chinese takeout boxes stacked on top of each other.”

We bought tickets to ride a special elevator to the viewing platform at the top. This took only thirty seconds. Numbers whizzed by on the display as we flew up through each of the 101 floors. There was no sound or shudder to indicate we had moved. Our ears popped, and we all pressed our fingers against our temples at once.

On the top floor, there were lookout points along wraparound glass walls. Some areas were designated for you to take photos with the whole city laid out beneath you, and other areas were decorated for social media, so that you could, for instance, take photos like you were on a fairy throne. I pressed against the glass and squinted as hard as I could into the distance, trying to glimpse the sea behind the mountains.

We kept seeing posters of a round black-and-yellow mascot whose face resembled an electrical outlet. The English translation read “Damper Baby.” At first I thought this was a bad translation of “diaper,” and wondered why a Diaper Baby was plastered all over the top floor of Taipei's tallest building. But then we found some explanatory text and learned it really was a damper ball.

This was a technical term. The Damper Baby represented the enormous steel sphere that hung like a pendulum inside Taipei 101 to stabilize it against earthquakes.

We went down one floor so we could see this damper ball in action. Along the hallway were screens playing footage of Taipei 101 swaying visibly during typhoons. Taipei was located above a tectonic fault—it apparently saw hundreds of low-magnitude earthquakes a year. One day the whole city might collapse, and even this damper ball would go crashing to the ground. But not yet.

The damper ball was honey colored, tiered like a beehive, suspended from the ceiling by four golden cords. It looked like a massive Ferrero Rocher chocolate ball. When I leaned close, I could see it quivering ever so slightly. I took a picture and texted it to my father, who had studied engineering in college.

Inertia, he responded. A very powerful force.

Downstairs, in Taipei 101's basement food court, we embarrassed ourselves trying to order lunch. Food words were somehow the hardest nouns to learn. Words like “burger” and “bowl” and “baked” were okay, but then there were specialized terms like “osmanthus” and “passion fruit,” words we rarely encountered in everyday speech, impossible to decipher on a menu. Anna and I tried ordering the set lunch from the Sichuanese stall, but then we struggled to select our vegetable sides—we didn't know the words for cucumber, oyster mushroom, or lotus. I must have learned them at some point, but in the moment, I couldn't recall them. The best I could do was point and nod. “That one, that one—and that one.”

I'd always struggled with ordering Chinese food back home. Chinese restaurants were where Chinese Americans went to feel shame. Every now and then I got overconfident and tried to order for my friends. Chinese text, I would tell the hostess: literally, “four positions”; figuratively, “Could we have a table for four?” Then we would sit, and I would scrutinize the menu, etching in my short-term memory the names of the dishes I knew we wanted. Chinese text—sautéed garlic eggplant. Chinese text—kung pao chicken.

I rehearsed these names under my breath, so I wouldn't have to read them haltingly off the menu when the time came. Sometimes someone wanted to try something new, but I dissuaded them if I didn't know the characters involved. Snow peas with shrimp? Forget it.

The waiter would come by, and I would smoothly rattle off our order, even ask for a pot of jasmine tea and rice bowls all around. This won me such admiration! The waiter spoke only to me. I was the conduit here, and my friends gazed wonderingly as I carried out the exchange.

But then came the modifications. Someone wanted to know if the cabbage was cooked in chicken broth, or if it was vegetarian. Someone wanted to modify the spice level of the kung pao chicken.

Disaster—now I had to go off script, and everyone watched as I scrambled for the words, patching them into imperfect sentences. Someone was allergic to peanuts, but I forgot the word for “peanuts.” Does this have, um . . . um. The closest thing I could think of was the word for “almonds,” because almond jelly was one of my favorite desserts. And I did not know the word for allergy.

I knew it was related to the word for “sensitive,” but calling my friend sensitive would not clarify things. Peanuts were a matter of life and death; I could not approximate.

The moment I switched back to English, the waiter gave me a knowing look. Then the rest of the order would proceed in English, and I would sink back in my chair, my authority diminished. Chinese text, I would remember, too late. Peanuts were Chinese text, fucking duh.

I could switch back to Chinese for things like water, more tea, or the check. But there would be no point. They had already seen through me.

At the bakery, I hadn't yet opened my mouth when the girl at the register reported my total in English. This also happened at the bubble tea stand, the post office, and the umbrella store.

“That's normal,” said Skipper. “Young Taiwanese people like to practice their English.”

Still, I felt marked. What had given me away?

We took the red line to Liberty Square, where we walked up eighty-nine steps to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall to stand under the great bronze statue of the first president of Taiwan. I realized I had no idea how Chiang Kai-shek was perceived here: whether people adored him (on account of his founding the nation), despised him (on account of all the authoritarian repression), or generally admired him and accepted his foibles the way Americans did George Washington. Not far from the Memorial Hall was the 228 Peace Memorial Park. We argued briefly over which peace this was memorializing, exactly. Anna was certain that it was about the Cold War détente, and Belinda thought it had to do with the Japanese, and when we consulted the internet it turned out neither of them was right: It was about the February 28 Massacre of 1947, in which the Nationalists had killed thousands of civilians protesting Chiang Kai-shek's rule. J.C said that he had read an article about how Taiwan was now debating removing all public statues of Chiang Kai-shek, and that made us feel worse about our Memorial Hall selfies.

In my freshman history classes I had gathered the impression that Chiang Kai-shek was a corrupt president, a wartime leader so obsessed with eradicating the Communists that one of his own generals had to kidnap him to persuade him to start fighting back against the Japanese. My mother, a mainlander, told me once that she had grown up calling him Baldy Chiang. She said that the Communists were very good at coming up with insults based on personal appearance. As a child, she and her schoolmates would skip down the road and sing: The Chiangs were so poor after they fled to Taiwan that they couldn't even afford clothing, just a bikini, and they tried to cover up the front, and then the back, but it didn't matter, their butts were still exposed.

This was catchier in Chinese.

There was a local election coming up. We saw campaign posters all over the city, inspiring headshots and big block slogans, but we couldn't make out which parties were more democratic, or which were for or against independence, or even whether pro-independence was the politically correct opinion to have. For a long time I had been fuzzy on the geopolitical status of Taiwan, in large part because none of my teachers had ever given me a clear explanation. Everyone spoke about it in such loaded euphemisms. They always asked sideways questions to determine my affiliations: Was I born on the mainland?

Where on the mainland? Did I have family in Hong Kong? Were any of my family in the Party? Then shouldn't I know how I felt about Taiwan?

But after a semester of Introduction to Chinese History I had finally gotten a grasp on things, and these were the essential facts one needed to know about Taiwan, as I understood them:

1. In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War. This was good or bad depending on whether you were a Communist.

2. The Nationalist Party, who were not the Communists, then promptly fled to Taipei, which they declared the temporary capital of China. This was good or bad depending on whether you were a waishengren or a benshengren. Simply put, there were many people already living in Taiwan—some ethnically Chinese, some not—who felt they had been getting along fine before the Nationalists took over. This too was contested history, given that before the Nationalists arrived, the island was under Japanese colonial rule. But that was a separate conversation.

Once in Taiwan, the Nationalists pledged that they would regroup and take back the mainland, but they never did. The Americans, their closest allies, did not want to commit resources to a sustained civil war in China. They were too busy with all the other wars going on during the Cold War. Stuck on the island, the Nationalists established a repressive regime of martial rule. This was bad for everyone.

During the Cold War, China persecuted suspected capitalists and Taiwan persecuted suspected communists. This was bad for everyone who found themselves on the wrong side of the strait. It was also bad for everyone else, who got caught in the crossfire no matter what they did.

As the Cold War went on, mainland China broke from Russia, opened up to the rest of the world, and convinced the U.N to let them replace Taiwan in the General Assembly. This was good for mainland China, and bad for Taiwan. Martial rule was lifted in 1987, and Taiwan transitioned to a democracy. This was good for everyone. And this was the state of affairs today. China counted Taiwan as part of its territory, but Taiwan had its own government and held its own elections.

America had made security promises on Taiwan's behalf. All this was good or bad depending on how you felt about American imperialism, Chinese authoritarianism, and Taiwanese self-determination. From one perspective, Taiwan was the last bulwark of democracy against China, an island that represented what a free China could have been, to be protected at all costs. From another, Taiwan was a stronghold of imperialist sympathizers, held hostage by the empire, longing to be rightfully returned to the motherland.

But I had learned that things were not so simple. Taiwan was not that democratic, and China was not that communist. In fact, you couldn't even be a proper Communist in China anymore. We had learned this from Rayer, our language teaching assistant at Yale last spring. Rayer was an organizer for the graduate students' union.

She had skipped a third of our sections that semester because the union was on strike, but we still liked her, because she thought grades were neoliberal propaganda—she told us at the start of the semester that we were all getting A's. Rayer said that the Party had forgotten its promises to the laboring class, and labor organizers were being jailed and harassed, and some of them had in fact fled to Taiwan, which had paradoxically become a safe haven for the true leftists. You couldn't divide the world into ideological categories, Rayer said. Communist and capitalist nations were the same exploitative hellholes; there was no difference. Halfway through the semester, she told us someone had filed an anonymous complaint that “T.A's should be less political,” and then our sections weren't so interesting anymore.

“Holy shit,” said Anna.

“What?”

“Your legs.”

All morning I had been mindlessly scratching an itch on the back of my leg. I twisted around, looked down, and gave a little scream. At least a dozen quarter-sized red welts were scattered across my legs, from the ankles up to the thighs. Anna lifted her skirt.

They'd gotten her too—there were lumps all over her butt cheeks. She moaned.

“Is this an allergic reaction?” I asked. “Are we going to die?”

We consulted the internet. Anna took out a gel pen and drew some circles around the bigger bites. Within a few hours, the welts were double the size of the circles. That scared us—but we weren't dizzy or having trouble breathing, so we decided not to visit the emergency room.

The mosquitoes here had to be a different species, their venom chemically different. Mosquito bites never bothered me this much in the States. But these bites hurt like a motherfucker, and the itching never stopped. You couldn't even call it itching. It was a sharp, bone-deep pain. When I closed my eyes, I could see in my mind's eye a dozen hot knives digging into my flesh.

Why had the mosquitoes targeted us? Why did all the locals have such smooth, unblemished skin? Was it our burger-fed American blood?

We hurried to Watsons, the drugstore. We scoured the shelves looking for spray canisters with insect labels but couldn't find any. We went up to an employee. Neither of us knew the term for mosquito repellent, so Anna pointed at our legs. “We have a problem to resolve,” she said. “Ah,” said the employee, and led us to the front of the store, where bright orange cans of Off! were stacked up in a window display. They were on sale for the summer: three canisters for the price of two. We bought six.

Belinda discovered that the Taipei Film Festival was still running that weekend and suggested we go to a screening. We all agreed. Film festivals seemed enriching, precisely the kind of thing you could get only in an immersive foreign language environment. But there were no films in Mandarin on Sunday's program. Sunday seemed mainly dedicated to the French New Wave, with some German surrealism in between. All the Chinese films on the schedule were made in Hong Kong, which meant they were in Cantonese, which none of us could speak.

We decided on a film called Lost (迷), the debut of the Hong Kong director Fan Ho. The program informed us that Lost had in fact been lost: After it premiered at Cannes in 1970, all screening reels were destroyed or went missing for half a century. The program did not explain why. The sole remaining copy—a 35 millimeters print with German subtitles—had been located by the Reel to Reel Institute. We all felt a sense of awe learning this. But for fate, we never would have seen this film. We might never see it again—it didn't seem like the kind of thing you could stream at home.

Lost was about a young man's identity crisis in Hong Kong in the 1950s—after the Chinese Civil War, after the mainland and Hong Kong and Taiwan functionally became different countries. The young man was trapped between two poles: China and tradition versus the West and modernity. These poles were represented by two women.

At the beginning of the film, the man meets a young woman with long, uncombed black hair who lives in an abandoned castle. She is clearly not doing well, mentally speaking, but she is very beautiful and mysterious, so they fall in love. They do all sorts of traditional Chinese activities together: reading the classics, playing the zither, admiring the calligraphy on their fans. But tragedy looms.

The young woman is afraid of forces she cannot name. She tells the man that someone is coming for her, that they'll take her away and he'll never see her again. He vows to help her escape from the castle before this happens, but when he comes back the next day, she isn't there.

He runs through the empty halls, shouting her name. The castle is abandoned. He realizes he's all alone, in a ruin of forgotten relics. Perhaps he's been alone all this time.

Despondent, the man then goes to a party, where he meets another woman, with thick eyeliner, big mussed-up hair, and Western clothes. She is dancing on a table. Her name is Beibei. He and Beibei go to an attic room somewhere and have sex. Afterward, he is clearly repulsed by her: He sits against the wall and starts to cry. She asks him how he's feeling, and he pouts and refuses to speak with her. The next day, he walks out in a field. Beibei appears wearing hunting gear.

She misfires and shoots him in the head, and he winds up in a coma. That's the end of the movie. We all sat a moment in silence, unsure of whether we were supposed to laugh. We didn't know how to interpret the coma.

We emerged wincing into the afternoon—the sun and heat were shocking after hours in the cool dark. Devin loved the film. He felt it was a brilliant exploration of cultural alienation, of the half-life of assimilation, the violence of British colonialism. I felt that the young man was being a bit of a baby, and Anna agreed. Anna felt that the director clearly hated women, and that if Beibei wanted to dance on tables and wear Western clothes and shoot guns, then that was her right. Why would the young man choose to sleep with her and then sulk about it? Why was Westernization so bad? We'd all grown up in America; did that make us so evil?

As we walked down the steps outside, I felt a sudden pressure against my hip. I turned. A boy my age was slumped against me. I tensed, fearing—what? I didn't know. He collapsed to the ground: a soft, fluid motion, more a slide than a fall. For a moment nobody noticed.

Anna and Devin walked on past me, and I shouted, “Guys—” They turned, looked at me, and it seemed an eternity passed before they saw the boy. By then several people were clustered around him—patting his head, feeling for his pulse. “Should we call an ambulance?” Anna asked. We all took out our phones, but no one made a call. We didn't know the emergency services number in Taiwan. They had told us in orientation—something with nines, ones, and zeroes—but in that moment I could not remember, and I couldn't look it up; my fingers were shaking too badly to type.

Someone shouted for water. Someone unzipped the boy's jacket. Someone cradled his head, murmuring things in Chinese. His friends? Bystanders? I couldn't tell. The girl cradling his head looked up. “Stop staring!” she snapped. “Don't crowd him.” We backed away.

We crossed the square, away from the crowd. I felt vaguely criminal, though we hadn't done anything wrong. I glanced back over my shoulder. The young man was sitting up now, eyes open, sipping from a bottle of water. “Probably heat exhaustion,” said J.C. “He looks okay.” But I kept replaying how, when I first felt the boy's presence, my instinct was to jerk away. The boy had fainted against me, he had needed help, and I had just let him fall.

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 see what he was recording. 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 V.P.N. 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 Chinese text, not Chinese text; 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 U.V 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 Chinese text, and “-ism” was Chinese text, and “socialism” was just Chinese text, “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.

Women don't want babies.

Babies are scared—I mean, babies are scary.

The government doesn't protect them. The government doesn't protect women.

So of course the population gets older.

But old people need protection too. I mean, health insurance.

The government doesn't protect them either.

Therefore, aging is very bad.

Thought and Society was going to fix me. By the end of the summer I would be capable of discoursing on public health, the changes in Taiwanese demographics, the pitfalls of Chinese people's regional attachments, the origins of the Chinese writing system, and the role of the novel in contemporary Chinese society. I would also, finally, know the proper term for “pandemic.”

Next I had my first elective class, Modern Taiwanese Literature with Teacher Lin. Teacher Lin was the youngest and prettiest instructor on the faculty. Many of the year-round students were infatuated with her, and they kept flirting with her in the hallway during the ten-minute break between classes. I wondered what it was like to be flirted with by people who were bad at your language.

I this weekend discovered a secret. Yes—a café for cats! Do you like as well, the cats?

There were only two other students taking Modern Taiwanese Literature. Meijuan was from Myanmar, and she spoke Mandarin with a pert, precise accent. She was a medical student—all her siblings were doctors—but she was taking a break from her degree to improve her Chinese. She gave some explanation for why fluency in Chinese helped you as a doctor in Myanmar, but I couldn't understand it.

Shuya was a graduate student at U.C.L.A. I was convinced Shuya was Russian. He didn't have a Russian accent or anything; I just assumed that Shuya was a Sinicization of Shulya, which I imagined was a Russian or at least a Slavic name. I had read The Brothers Karamazov on my flight to Taipei, so in my head all these associations were natural ones to make. Also, Shuya had a dour resting face, and he spoke with a slow, profound affect. What could be more Russian than that? Later, in the student lounge, I found out that his English name was Nathan, and that he was from Wyoming. I felt betrayed. Who had named him Shuya?

Anna and I didn't have the same lunch break, but I was excited to venture out alone. I knew that just north of campus, across the main road, were several streets lined with lunch spots popular with Taiwanese students. I had looked up several and settled on an onigiri shack that had lots of good reviews. I'd found the menu—chalk characters on a blackboard—by zooming in on one of the photos.

I had looked up the characters and knew how to pronounce the words for tuna onigiri and grilled salmon onigiri. I had the correct change in my pocket; I wanted the exchange to be seamless. But the onigiri shack was not there. I stopped where the dot on my phone indicated it should be, and all I saw was a brick wall.

The most recent review I could find was from three days ago. So it was unlikely this shack had suddenly closed down. Maybe it was only open on certain days of the week.

But there was not even an empty storefront with a Closed sign. There was nothing that indicated an onigiri shack had ever existed on this spot.

I walked back and forth on the street, glaring at empty space. I felt utterly defeated. The stakes were not high—I did not want onigiri that much—but right then, I'd lost any confidence in my ability to process external information. I felt I was losing my grip on reality. The internet had promised this shack would be there, and it was not.

It was blindingly hot outside. My neck was slick with sweat. I should have just picked a restaurant, any restaurant, and gone inside, but I couldn't stop pacing.

I had to resolve this glitch. So this was how hikers went missing and died of heatstroke just yards from the trail. Your mind went little by little, and then you just made worse and worse decisions until you died.

“Hey, Lily!”

It was J.C. We had spent all weekend together, but still I was surprised he knew my name. We had never conversed directly—he was always speaking to Skipper, or Devin, or Belinda, or all of us at once. This was the first time we had looked each other in the eyes.

“I think maybe no one else has this lunch break,” he said. “Where were you headed?”

“I'm having trouble deciding,” I said.

“I can see that,” said J.C. “I saw you across the street. You've been swiveling your head back and forth for like a full minute.”

I explained about the onigiri place and the Google Maps reviews.

“Huh,” said J.C. “That is weird. But I'm really hungry. Does it have to be onigiri?”

We decided I was overthinking it. There were about sixty more lunches to go before we left Taipei. If we had a bad lunch today, then we could try again tomorrow. We could afford to waste a meal. We walked into the first place around the corner, which turned out to be wonderful: a Hainanese chicken rice joint, which served an option of three different cuts of tender steamed meat over yellow rice cooked in broth.

We ordered the set lunches, which came with iced tea. I sat beneath an A.C vent, relishing the air against my neck. Slowly my mind flickered back to life, and I took stock of my present situation.

Here I was, with the famous J.C. Now what? Such a vast information asymmetry lay between us. J.C knew almost nothing about me. But I had seen multiple YouTube videos of his mother, watched all of his sister's TikToks, and read a 2005 Time profile wherein a toddler J.C counted to ten and back in French, to a reporter's delight. I knew that J.C lived in Davenport and was, last spring, romantically attached to a recently retired Olympian figure skater. And here I was in my shapeless smock, makeup free, cheeks burning, dripping with sweat. Why should he care what I had to say?

Fortunately J.C was happy to carry the conversation. He didn't mind talking at length about himself. I just had to ask some guiding questions, and off he went. His day was going all right so far. Thought and Society had too much homework, but he was excited about his morning elective.

The whole class was structured around discussing episodes from a period drama called A Touch of Green, which was based on a novella by the Taiwanese writer Bai Xianyong. It was about the wives of Chinese air force fighter pilots during World War 2. “It's really sad,” he said. “We're only in the first episode, so we're just meeting the main characters. It's really cute. There's this one hotshot pilot, and he's fallen in love with this shy wallflower girl.

But you know it's going to be tragic—I mean, the music is just giving a tragic vibe.”

I asked if he had read the novella, and he said he was trying to avoid spoilers. But it was a World War 2 drama, after all. He predicted that the pilot, and probably his girlfriend too, would die in a plane crash, or in a shootout with the Japanese.

J.C smelled good. I was shocked to discover this. I had never considered that boyish sweat could be a good smell, but sitting there I felt an intense pull toward the wet spot at the small of his back.

I wanted to bury my face in it. I felt dizzy. I lowered my fork; suddenly I had no appetite. What was happening to me?

“Shoot.” J.C checked his watch. “Sorry, I'm supposed to call my mom.”

“Oh—okay, no worries.”

“This was great, though.” He gathered up his things and pushed toward the door, waving over his shoulder. “We'll try the ramen place tomorrow? Meet in the lobby?”

“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:

- Chinese text: to palpitate

- Chinese text: buttocks

- Chinese text: mandolin

- Chinese text: truck

- Chinese text: fish scales

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: Chinese text. 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 “D.N.A 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 most of 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 complicated 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?”

She wrote some characters on the board: Chinese text. Can't open it, can see it, can't wear it.

“Oh!” I said. “Well, that's easy. That's just . . .” But I had no way to articulate how this pattern worked. I didn't even know how to translate it to English. I knew exactly what these words meant, but only in Chinese.

“It is an extremely difficult grammatical structure! I have American students who can never get over this. I have students doing advanced research in Classical Chinese who still do not have an intuitive grasp of the resultative ending. But you don't struggle with it at all. Do you know what this means?”

“That I will learn faster?”

“No!” Her voice shot up in pitch. “It means you are lazy. I know your type! Some things come easy to you, so you think everything will.

But in fact, you are more prone to making mistakes, because you trust an inner ear that only works some of the time. You will have a very difficult time developing a more sophisticated grammar repertoire unless you treat Chinese as seriously as you would any foreign language—like French. Okay, Lily?”

I had the sudden urge to cry. “Okay.”

“Good! Now, today's vocabulary!” She pointed to her computer monitor. “Chinese text—use this in a sentence!”

When our fifty minutes were up, I felt like I had been electrocuted. Teacher Sun asked me if I was otherwise adjusting well to Taipei, and I said that for the most part everything was fine, except for the mosquitoes.

“Ah!” she screamed. “Get a Japanese spray!” She pulled up the brand on her monitor so that I could recognize it at Watsons: a bright blue tonic with a katakana label. “It has an ingredient that's banned in the U.S. I don't know. Maybe it's poison—maybe it will make your children deformed, ha ha. But it will absolutely stop the itching!”

I was startled to see sunlight when I left the building. It was only four in the afternoon; I felt, spiritually, that it was two in the morning. I thought of the hours of homework I had been assigned, and I wanted to shrink into a ball.

Anna was beat too. She hadn't waited for me in the student lounge—she texted that she had already gone home. We had meant to check out a nearby café after class, but she was, as she put it, fighting for her life.

She had written this in Chinese, so it read like “waging a war on the behalf of me.” When I returned to the apartment, she was sprawled facedown on the couch, her textbooks strewn on the floor beside her. I nudged her ankle. She moaned. I adopted the same position on the floor, and we lay there in silence for a moment, stirring only to scratch at our bites.

We tried to figure out why we were so tired. The conversation was halting, but after much dictionary consultation, we worked out a theory. In high school, this kind of schedule had been effortless. We were in class from eight to four every day, with homework afterward, and this was just normal. But one year of university, with days where we had only one class in the afternoon, or days when we didn't have class at all, had spoiled us. We were incapable of doing good, hard work now. We were doomed.

“We will get tougher,” said Anna. She tapped at her phone and read, “We will be tempered a hundred times to become steel.”

But I did not feel like steel. The novelty had worn off. Nothing about Taipei was exciting anymore; not the colorful I.C metro cards, not the abundance of milk tea shops, not the clean public bathrooms, not the buses and trains that ran so miraculously on time. All I could notice were the indignities: how the tap water was not safe to drink; how we had to refill our water bottles from a dispenser in the hallway; how the laundry machine never fully dried our clothes, only made them hot and wet, so that we had to drape them over the chairs, the bed, the windowsill, every surface with an edge; how this room, which was clearly too small for two people, had no chairs or desks. To do our homework we had to sprawl on the bed, which hurt our necks; or we would have to go to a café, and this meant venturing back out into the heat, the mosquitoes, spraying another full-body layer of sticky, staining Off! The vacation was over. We were here to work.

N.T.U E-PROOF—not FOR SALE

HarperCollinsPublishers

....................................

2

By the end of the week, we had settled into a routine. Every morning Anna and I went out for breakfast: some combination of cut fruit, steamed wheat buns, soy milk, and braised tea eggs from the 7-Eleven around the corner. Anna showered first and left for the department, and then I showered and left an hour later. I spent two hours in class, and then I met J.C for lunch.

I felt a thrill every time I came down the staircase and saw him waiting in the lobby. I always assumed this was the day he would find other plans or decide I was not as interesting as he'd thought. But he was always there.

John Cahan-Song could have had lunch with anyone in Taipei, and still he wanted to have lunch with me.

We tried a new lunch spot every day. So far we'd had Indonesian stir-fried noodles, Korean soft tofu stews, and shrimp wonton noodle soups. We still had not managed to obtain onigiri, but we held out hope.

I learned that J.C was anxious about his future; that he didn't want to be a professor because both his parents were professors and he didn't want to spend his whole life in their shadows, but he wasn't sure what else to do with a degree in sociolinguistics; and that he did love his sister, but due to his poor estimation of her current boyfriend, whom she had met at a conference for influencers, they were not talking at the moment. I, too, was not talking to my sisters at the moment. J.C asked if they were also dating losers and I said no; one liked to pretend I didn't exist, and the other was a spoiled brat. We agreed: Families are tough.

In the afternoons, Anna waited for me in the student lounge until the end of my one-on-one class, and we returned to the apartment together. Most days we stopped for bubble tea or sweet tofu pudding along the way. Then after some “recovery” time—Anna lay facedown on the bed, and I lay faceup on the couch—we went to one of the cafés along our alley to do our homework.

Anna liked Come True Coffee because they served wobbly three-inch tall soufflé pancakes with ube syrup. I liked Youmoutoohana because they served osmanthus barley tea with free refills of hot water, and because they played moody covers of English songs sung in such a thick Japanese accent that the lyrics were unintelligible.

We often worked at the cafés until closing; this meant no matter what, we stopped studying at eleven o'clock sharp. We agreed we had to prioritize our sleep; we could not pull all-nighters. We had discovered that the secret to surviving such an intensive language program was accepting that we were never fully prepared for class.

I had always been a diligent student: I liked to double-check my homework, to quiz myself on my vocabulary lists until I was certain I knew all the words by heart. Here this was impossible. There was just too much to do. There was no time to study—only to frantically absorb enough material to make it through the next day's class.

Despite this, the language was sticking. The transformation was happening as promised. I no longer had to strain for those common linkage words: “because,” “therefore,” “however,” “despite.” Forced, constant repetition smoothed the awkward hesitation over everyday phrases. I could now comment on the weather. I could now make reservations for a table for two.

My sentence structures were improving too. I knew more complex clauses, and I could hold longer thought patterns in more nuanced logical relation to one another in my head before I said them out loud. It felt so cool to utter a thought without repeating it in my mind several times beforehand.

I could just think, and what came out was what I meant. I felt the best when I could get to the end of a sentence without pausing to find a word—when all the vocabulary was present and fell neatly into place. My mental machinery was oiling up—I could almost hear the satisfying click, whir.

“Be it granted that we might lay equal emphasis on moral, intellectual, physical, and social education, at the same time it cannot be denyed that intellectual achievement is the standard generally recognized by most people in higher education,” I said in one breath, without pausing.

Teacher Sun clapped. “Wow!”

I started heading to the department earlier and earlier every morning so that I could practice my Chinese with whoever was around in the student lounge. I wasn't as anxious about bothering strangers here as I was at home. The stakes of a conversation were different when we were both bad at the medium. The normal rules governing social boundaries did not apply.

Nothing was too intrusive. You could just walk up to someone and say, “Classmate, you look like you are an athlete—is it true?”

Our program attracted a lot of non-American international students, who fascinated me because I always forgot other countries had their own bilateral relationships with China. I liked hearing international students speak Chinese, because I could somehow always make out their regional accents. There were such things as German-accented Chinese, Italian-accented Chinese, and French-accented Chinese. I couldn't pinpoint the sound changes behind them. I just knew they were there.

I spent most mornings chatting with a German girl named Mageli—Margrit. Margrit's parents were missionaries, so she had spent her childhood in Nanjing, and therefore spoke with a better accent than most of us. Margrit told me that all of her aunts and uncles worked in various Sinology departments across Europe. She showed me an abstract of a paper her uncle had co-authored on Yunnanese folk theater. “It's in the family,” she said. “I don't know why, but we all happened to develop a deep academic interest in China.”

Everyone was a bit in love with Margrit. She had long dancer's legs and wavy blond hair, and she always wore these silky maxi dresses that draped elegantly over her curves. Margrit was not much older than I was, but she already had a fiancé, Helmut, who was studying livestock agriculture in Zürich. Helmut and Margrit's dream was to take over Helmut's uncle's sheep farm when he retired. They always spoke on the phone during Margrit's lunch breaks, when Helmut had just woken up. Most afternoons, as I set off with J.C, I saw Margrit smiling and pacing in the walkway in front of the department. Once she turned Helmut around so that he could say hello, but he didn't seem that interested in me.

If Margrit wasn't in the lounge, I spent my mornings chatting with an Italian undergraduate named Baoluo—Paolo—who had a long, pensive face and wore his hair in an oily braid that reached the small of his back. In addition to his native Italian and Venetian, Paolo was also fluent in French, German, and English. He was slowly working toward a bachelor's degree in geography, which he explained was sort of like social studies and international relations mixed together. It was slow going because he kept taking time off to backpack around the world. Chinese was his third Asian language—he had spent some years of high school in Japan, and he had a pen pal in South Korea.

I asked Paolo why he loved learning languages so much. He told me it had all started in middle school. He was learning French in class and discovered that if he kept his diary at home in French, then his parents, whom Paolo described as “not educated people,” would never find out what he was thinking about. As his need for secrecy grew—he didn't specify why, only that it did—he had to resort to more and more languages to keep his thoughts hidden from the world.

I had never known someone who learned more languages for the express purpose of not being understood. It made me think of the author Yiyun Li, whom I had read last semester in a class on Asian American literature. I told Paolo about how Yiyun Li had quit writing in Chinese, her native language, and begun publishing in English as an adult. Li had considered the total abandonment of her Chinese as a kind of suicide—an escape from that which could not be spoken of.

I asked Paolo if he had buried any part of himself in Italian. Paolo gave me a suspicious look. “That is very personal,” he said, and began packing up his bag.

Sometimes in the evenings, when the sun went down, Anna and I liked to walk through the neighboring Da'an Forest Park.

We shared the park with retirees. Every night we walked past a platoon of old men practicing tai chi, or women in identical puffer vests dancing in synchronization to a folk song played from a loudspeaker while an instructor in a bright orange baseball cap and a microphone headset shouted out instructions. Once, we were bumped off the road by an old man jogging with training weights strapped to his wrists and ankles.

He couldn't have been under seventy. His calves were jacked, bulging the size of oranges.

I was trying to cure myself of the impulse to assume every Asian person I encountered was a relative, but I couldn't help it. For most of my childhood, every Asian person in the room was more likely related to me than not—a family friend, at least. So every time we passed an old person on the path, I felt a protective pang in my chest. And every time they returned my gaze, I smiled and waved, and I kept feeling confused when they didn't wave back.

Anna called her parents every night before she went to bed. She always stepped out into the hallway to talk, but the walls were thin, and her chirpy voice carried through as if she were standing right next to me. She spoke mainly in English, with an increasing amount of saccharine Chinese phrases slipped between thoughts. She was loving Taipei; she could quote Confucius now, did they want to hear about Confucius? She was eating so much good food, she was going to gain so much weight, ha ha, she would do a juice cleanse when she got back, her teachers were so sweet, and she was so excited to see everyone in August, when the program was done; yes, she had the flights in her calendar, yes, she'd get to the airport two hours early; give her love to Victor, hug Muffin for her, love you so much, talk to you tomorrow.

I hadn't heard from my parents since my first weekend in Taipei. This was normal—they often went weeks without calling me—but I did worry whether everything was all right. I tried calling once, but no one picked up. I texted Flora to check that nothing was wrong, and she responded Drama as usual, followed by a shrug emoji. I took this to mean that the forever war between Jasmine and my parents was currently in a hot cycle, as opposed to the more frequent but stable cold cycles, and that Flora had probably spent much of the last week in her room, headphones on to block out the noise. And it was selfish of me, but I was glad to be so far away from it all.

Are you okay, I asked.

Yeah, fine, wrote Flora. A beat later, enjoy Taipei.

The next Monday, I discovered I had lost all of my progress. I felt sluggish and slow all morning. New vocabulary wasn't sticking like it used to. Throughout both my morning classes, I kept fighting the impulse to answer in English. I wondered if I was sick, but I couldn't pinpoint anything physically wrong with me. I had felt fine that morning, and I didn't have a headache now. It was all cognitive.

I thought language learning would be a smooth upward trajectory, so I was shocked to discover that I was now speaking like a five-year-old. I winced at the sound of my own accent. Normally I had no trouble with tones, but today I was constantly fighting to get my tongue in order. Tones! The one skill I thought I'd inherited! My speech was afflicted with long, slow pauses while I reached for phrases that I had learned a long time ago, phrases that had suddenly and mysteriously vanished. Teacher Cai asked me to use the term for “gross domestic product” in a sentence, and I couldn't remember the word for “increase.”

By the time I got to my one-on-one class, I felt I had to apologize in advance. “I don't know what's going on with me today.” I tapped my temple several times to make my point. “My mind's not working.”

“This is normal,” said Teacher Sun. “You feel like you're making a lot of progress, and then suddenly one day everything gets harder. Your brain is making new connections, but that requires breaking all the old connections. You're emptying out your house—clearing space for new furniture.”

“But I sound like an idiot,” I said.

“In fact,” said Teacher Sun, “you have always sounded like an idiot. It is considerable progress that you can now hear it.”

So the assimilation would not be as quick as I'd hoped. I would have to redouble my efforts.

There was a gritty pleasure in this. I liked the verb phrase Chinese text, qiúxué, which meant to study or engage in research. But the character 求 could also mean to seek, to search, to demand. In period dramas, characters were always saying to each other, Chinese text; I beg of you, please don't kill my son, please don't send me into exile. The character 求 had a sense of urgency about it. You might die if you didn't get what you were 求-ing. I liked the idea that knowledge was something you had to seek desperately, with flashlights and shovels, digging out little nuggets of gold. Of course, the gold would not just fall into my palm. I would have to dig harder: read more passages, create more flash cards, compose more sentences.

It could still happen. It was only a matter of time.

In Considering the News, I always got tripped up by transliterations. Many proper nouns were translated not by meaning but with whatever characters offered the best homophonic fit. So Manchester became Chinese text (mànchèsitè), Georgia became Chinese text (qiáozhìyà), and Morehouse became Chinese text (mòěrháosi). I could never pronounce these smoothly when we did cold readings. I always had a mental back-and-forth over whether I should intonate the Chinese or just use the English pronunciation. If the point of transliteration was to approximate the original sound, then it seemed I should just say “Manchester,” “Georgia,” and “Morehouse” instead of the belabored pinyin approximations, which always felt vaguely racist to utter out loud—like I was imitating someone with broken English. But Teacher Shen made a face whenever I used the English pronunciations. “Come on, Lily,” she said. “We're supposed to be speaking Chinese.”

I preferred it when transliterated loanwords had meanings of their own. The loanword for Coca-Cola was Chinese text, pronounced kékǒukělè, which meant “tasty and amusing.” The loanword for “myth” was Chinese text, mísi, which meant “confusing thoughts,” or as I translated it, “thoughts that had traveled across a labyrinth.” The loanword for “proletariat” was Chinese text, pǔluó; the word for “popular” next to the word for “gather.” And the loanword for “jazz”: Chinese text, juéshì, which was also just the term for “gentleman”—and here I thought of Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole, suited up and popping their collars.

But sometimes the characters had nothing to do with the meaning. For instance, Chinese text, fěnsi, was the loanword for “fans,” because the characters sounded close enough. But Chinese text also meant “noodles,” and when we spoke of a pop star's fěnsi, I always thought of a bucket of cold rice noodles, wriggling in adoring delight.

We always made very little progress in my one-on-one class. We never got all the way through our daily vocabulary list because I had too many questions about each term. I had to understand its precise connotations, and all the situations in which I could use it. For instance: Chinese text, to split a melon, to allocate, to split into pieces.

You could split the melon of an estate, and all the heirs would fight over the scraps. But did splitting the melon have to be a bad thing? What about infinite resources? Could you split the melon of your parents' love?

“It feels like you are deliberately looking for the least plausible uses of each term,” said Teacher Sun.

I tried to explain to her that it was the implausible test cases that would help me understand the boundaries of phrases. How could I engage in wordplay otherwise? Was not the difference between literacy and literariness the ability to make puns?

Teacher Sun suggested I focus less on puns and more on using words in the correct context. “The problem with linguistic play is that you're only allowed to do it when you already know all the rules,” she said. “If you are fluent and you break a language, then everyone thinks you're very clever. So poets can do whatever they want. But if you aren't fluent and you break the language, then everyone just thinks you don't know how to speak.”

But the Taiwanese played with English all the time, and often not very well.

Nonsense English was everywhere in this city. In a single afternoon I saw T-shirts reading “Live FreE or Butterfly,” “I like eat cows and you,” and “Pussy cat pet pussy.” Once I saw a prim middle-aged woman proudly wearing a velvet cardigan with repeating block letters that read, “go Fuck.” These seemed like more than a case of a bad translation. I couldn't imagine what the source text would have been.

Someone had to be messing around. Someone was misusing a language just because it was funny: because they just liked the look of a letter or the position of a comma.

In the cluster of lunch spots north of campus, there was a pizza and pasta restaurant called I'm Pasta with a sign in English that read: “Once, I hate pasta. Now, it's my life.”

“Does Chinese have a V sound?” Anna asked late one night, long after I thought she'd gone to sleep.

I was still awake, so I pondered the matter. This was tough. It was hard to know for sure until I had reviewed every conversation I'd had earlier in the day, every term I'd gone through in my glossary, to confirm the absence of the sound. “Wow. I don't think so.”

“So we haven't made the V sound since we got here.”

“I guess not?”

“Vuh,” she said.

“V-v-v-v-v-v,” I said, like an engine.

“Veeeeeeee,” she said, like the Henry Higgins alphabet machine.

Teacher Cai told us that there was something called an “A.B.C accent,” which was the accent some “American-born Chinese” acquired when they were too lazy to distinguish between different consonant formations. She insisted that only boys used this accent, but it wasn't clear to us why. In Teacher Cai's opinion, girls were simply more diligent in every regard. None of us had the A.B.C accent, thank God. She couldn't bear to listen to that garbage all day.

Some boys who grew up in the United States—California, she specified, without further explanation—thought they didn't have to work hard at their Chinese pronunciation because they had it in their blood. So their tongues stayed flat, and they never learned to distinguish their zh from their zs, or their ch from the c's. They didn't even know they were doing this, because they couldn't hear the difference.

They were incurable. But the twist was that Taiwanese boys too had started adopting this accent when trying to pick up girls, because this made them sound more like American boys, who were generally understood to have more money and provided a pathway to a green card.

“Does it work?” Shanhong asked.

Teacher Cai looked aggrieved. “Still today, many people want to go to the U.S.”

“Hey, by the way.” Anna looked up from her textbook. We were studying together at Youmoutoohana . “Could you please stop leaving little black specks all over the bathroom floor?”

I too had noticed the black specks swimming across the floor of the shower area. I had assumed Anna was tracking them into the apartment. I knew I wasn't, because I always took off my shoes at the door.

“I'm not leaving black specks,” I said.

“Then where are they coming from?”

“Maybe they were already under the door. Maybe the water is drawing them out.”

“It's been two weeks,” she said. “The specks are not still seeping out from under the door.”

Still there were specks, and for the next few days, Anna would sigh dramatically in the bathroom as she mopped them up.

The sighs made me resentful. If she were a mature adult, I thought, she would just open the door and tell me she'd found more specks. I formulated this opinion in Chinese according to the sentence structure I had learned that morning: X ought to Y. Mature adults ought to communicate their grievances with direct, firm speech, not sigh dramatically in bathrooms.

Anna was in a bad mood because she had just returned from lunch with one of her mother's friends from college. Anna had met this woman only once before, when she was three, but there was enough of a familial connection that Anna had to address her as “Auntie Wen” and take three connecting trains across the city to meet her at her convenience. They had eaten at a high-end dim sum place inside a hotel. Auntie Wen was not even staying at this hotel. She had just booked the lunch there, because it was so fancy.

When Auntie Wen saw Anna, she exclaimed that she had gained weight. “Which was an insane thing to say,” said Anna, “because the last time she saw me I was three feet tall.” Then Auntie Wen had ordered nearly everything on the menu, urged Anna to try it all, and spent the next two hours asking Anna very targeted questions about her family—specifically, about her younger brother, Victor.

Anna explained that Victor was a sensitive subject for her family because of his undiagnosed A.D.H.D, which made him incapable of completing any of his coursework. “He has attention problems,” said Anna. “He can't look at a textbook for more than a minute; it makes him want to cry.” Victor was dependably a B and C student, which to Anna's parents was as bad as being a drug dealer. Anna had been lobbying her parents to get him some Adderall for years, but they didn't believe in Western medication, as this would be an admission of defeat.

Now Anna felt guilty. She had revealed too much: No one was supposed to know about Victor's A.D.H.D, or his poor grades. It was like admitting he had syphilis. Now Auntie Wen might spread this news across China, and soon enough everyone would know that Victor was incapable of doing his homework.

“But you don't even know if it's A.D.H.D,” I said.

“Everyone and their mom has A.D.H.D,” said Anna. “What else could it be?”

Anna explained that her mother and Auntie Wen had competed for the same scholarship as undergraduates in China, and that her mother had won funding to go to the United States for graduate study, and Auntie Wen hadn't. An American visa was a source of great envy at the time. Auntie Wen was wealthy now and could hire a private driver to take her across Taipei to eat in a restaurant inside a hotel. But still Auntie Wen had to take Anna's mother down a peg. My parents had their own rivals who liked to call me fat, so I understood the situation.

I asked whether the food was good at least, and Anna shrugged. “It was impressive,” she said. “They gave us a basket of golden pears, except they weren't pears. They were deep-fried sesame balls that looked like pears—they even had a little twig of chocolate to resemble a stem. And there were steamed sesame buns that looked like mushrooms, and slices of mushroom seared to resemble steaks.”

Auntie Wen had kept quizzing Anna on which foods were real or fake. Did she see the resemblance? Was she fooled? In Taiwan, it seemed, gourmet cuisine involved making foods look like other foods.

Auntie Wen had asked Anna whether any chefs in America could achieve imitations like this, and Anna told her about a pastry chef she followed on Instagram who could make cake look like everyday objects—even a shoe, or a toilet bowl. Those cakes were startlingly realistic. She'd shown Auntie Wen a video in which the pastry chef's boyfriend tried to turn the door handle to their apartment, only to discover it was actually cake. Auntie Wen had not found this so impressive.

In Modern Taiwanese Literature, Meijuan announced a crucial discovery: She had figured out why restaurants kept telling her the dishes she wanted to order weren't vegetarian, when they were clearly made without meat. They wouldn't even give her sautéed broccoli. It turned out that in Taipei, being vegetarian often indicated that you were Buddhist, and many Buddhists didn't eat garlic, onions, or chilis because they were “pungent spices”—flavors that could impede meditation and arouse the passions because they were so exciting. The problem was that almost everything that tasted good was made with garlic, onions, or chilis. So for several weeks, Meijuan had been living on steamed buns and bananas, because she couldn't get any other vegetarian food. The rub was that Meijuan was also a Buddhist. She just didn't think eating garlic would make her unbearably horny.

The secret to succeeding in Thought and Society was using lots of chengyu.

Chengyu were idiomatic, typically four-character phrases that often invoked a folktale or an allusion to a classic text. For instance: Chinese text, to add feet to a drawing of a snake. The story behind this involved a contest between two artists. They were trying to see who could paint the best snake.

One artist quickly finished his painting, got bored, and then ruined it by adding unnecessary details like feet. You could use this chengyu in all sorts of contexts: critiquing an essay, or making fun of someone's outfit. But you had to be careful not to confuse it with another chengyu: Chinese text, to paint a dragon and dot its eyes.

In this case, the extra details were a good thing. Dotting the eyes helped the dragon come to life and fly away.

Using chengyu was like using SAT vocabulary: The more you used, the smarter you sounded. In our class, spitting out a chengyu at a moment's notice was like doing a back handspring across the desks. Everyone gasped and applauded.

Why was the job market tough for new graduates? Because there were many monks, and only a little porridge. Why was health care so expensive in the United States? Because wolves and jackals had colluded, to the disadvantage of all. We loved deploying a well-placed chengyu. It made Teacher Cai so happy.

Occasionally, chengyu were longer than four characters. Teacher Cai taught us a really good one: Chinese text, halfway along the road emerges a Cheng Yaojin. Cheng Yaojin was a reckless, bumbling Tang-dynasty general known for showing up randomly and saving the day. This wasn't necessarily a good thing.

You didn't want Cheng Yaojin showing up, swinging his ax around without first assessing the situation. He ruined all your plans.

“Do you think J.C is into me?” asked Anna.

I was so surprised by this question that I almost laughed. J.C? Anna? When? But she really meant it. Her face was open, earnest. I had to rearrange my features into a careful, neutral expression before I could respond.

“Why do you think that?”

“Last weekend, I don't know. I thought I felt something.” Anna twirled her pen. “You eat lunch with him, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you could perhaps mention me? Examine the . . .” She wanted to say “vibe,” I could tell, but there was no equivalent in Chinese. “Examine the situation?”

I didn't know why I hated the prospect. I had put no thought into attempting a romantic attachment with J.C myself; it seemed so wildly out of reach. So I couldn't be jealous; we weren't competing. But still, the sight of Anna's wide, hopeful eyes made me squirm.

“I don't know,” I said. “That feels kind of awkward.”

“Just be subtle—like, see if I come up. Or we could all go out to a café sometime after class. Would you suggest that to him?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Maybe this week?”

“I'll try.” I tugged my laptop closer to me. I didn't want to talk about this anymore. The thought of the two of them together gave me a weird itch in my side, like a mosquito bite that I couldn't scratch. J.C, walking hand in hand with Anna—no, some things were just not meant to be.

I tried to focus on my presentation. Each week we had to write an essay for Thought and Society, correct it with our one-on-one tutor, and then present it to our classmates. The essays had to be eight hundred words in length. I kept writing half a sentence, highlighting the whole document, and checking the word count. Somehow I was freshly disappointed when it grew in increments of only five or ten words.

We got to choose any topic we wanted, but this was what I got hung up on. I didn't want to choose a topic that was too difficult, because then I would have to do the work of researching that essay, instead of just translating it into Chinese. But I didn't want to make an easy argument that I didn't agree with just because it fit the vocabulary and grammar I currently had at my disposal. Yet no matter how hard I tried, I kept finding my thoughts warped and flattened when I rendered them into Chinese. It was so much easier to say “Students who are sick should not come in to class” than “With the tools of distance learning, we should be able to accommodate everyone.”

This was the problem with having access to only simple grammar. It made your thinking simple too. If I had complex clauses, then I would have used them, but we were only two lessons into our textbook.

We had to use at least three grammar structures from the current chapter in every presentation. So whatever I wrote had to express the following logic.

- I would ____ _ rather than ____ _.

- Whatever the case may be, ____ _.

- Although ____ _, it is not necessarily ____ _.

I strained to focus, but the mosquito bite would not go away.

Although J.C had been nice to Anna, he did not necessarily like her.

Whatever the case may be, I resolved not to care.

Halfway along the road emerged an Anna.

She wanted to join me and J.C for lunch. She didn't give me any warning. She was just waiting there in the lobby, beaming, when I came down the stairs to meet J.C.

“Oh!” I said. “Hi!”

“Oh, hey,” said J.C, who had just noticed she was there.

“My one-on-one tutor is out sick today,” she explained. “Where are we going?”

We decided to try the conveyor belt sushi restaurant south of campus. Since it was a single belt, there were no four-top tables, only one large table that spanned the middle of the restaurant. We had to sit three in a row at the counter. Anna and I sat on the sides, J.C in the middle.

Whenever someone spoke, we had to lean or twist around to make eye contact. And if I wanted to say something to Anna, or vice versa, then we had to lean forward against the counter and speak across J.C. This made everything seem adversarial, though I couldn't tell if I was the only one who felt this way. Was J.C also annoyed by this intrusion? Did he also wish Anna would disappear?

Things started getting testy with the chopsticks. Every other eating accoutrement was laid out at our seat stations—napkins, dishes for soy sauce and wasabi, and even little hot water dispensers for our tea—but the chopsticks were nowhere to be found. Anna wanted to flag down the server, but he was so busy helping a queue of people settling up that we couldn't get his attention. At last, I noticed the couple across the conveyor belt extracting their chopsticks from a drawer under the table.

We crouched down, and there it was: a near-invisible line in the counter. We never could have found it ourselves.

“We should have just gotten up and asked,” said J.C.

“I didn't want to look like a foreigner,” I said.

“Right, Lily hates when people know she's a foreigner,” said Anna.

“What's so bad about looking like a foreigner?” J.C asked.

“There's nothing bad,” I said. “I think—I don't know. I think I just really like trying to blend in.”

“They're not going to treat you worse if they know you're foreign,” said Anna. She was speaking English now; we all were, and somehow Anna's English voice was deeper, meaner. She never sounded so sarcastic in Chinese. “Taipei's famously friendly.”

“I know, I'm not scared of that.” I shifted in my seat. “I just want to try living like I'm from here.”

“Lily is very insecure about her Chineseness,” Anna told J.C.

But it wasn't just about my Chineseness. For as long as I could remember, I had loved observing how other people went about their lives. Whenever I traveled, I liked to watch strangers on their daily routines: their commuting routes, where they went for lunch, the parks they strolled in after work, the convenience stores where they picked up disposable masks for the subway or cartons of fat-free milk for their coffee. I liked browsing convenience stores, and I liked watching people walk through metro tunnels.

I did this at home too; in the winter especially, I loved walking down streets at night when everyone was inside, looking into each warmly lit living room as I passed. What kind of person would I be if I lived in the home with the football pennant flags? The nativity scenes? The enormous collection of Fellini D.V.D's? I always felt a strange jealousy over even the most mundane evidence of another life—an assortment of mugs, a stack of test prep books—for no reason other than that life was not mine.

I tried to articulate all this to J.C and Anna. “Haven't you ever wanted to slip into someone else's life? Just for a few minutes, just to see what it's like?”

“Not really,” said Anna. “I'm happy with who I am. I mean, we're pretty lucky to live these lives, all considered.”

“No, I'm happy with my life too! I just get so curious about other people. Like—it feels so unfair that we only get to live once, and we only get to experience the world from one perspective.

I think about this with other bodies too. Other genders, or bodies very different from mine. Yours, for instance.” I looked over at J.C. “I'd like to know what it's like to live as you for a few hours.”

“This feels like a sex thing,” said J.C.

“It's really not a sex thing. Well—I guess maybe, it could be a sex thing, but not the way I think about it. I'm just curious. What does the world look like if you're tall? Or if you have hair in places that I don't? Or if your limbs are just stronger, or longer, like yours?”

“That's very flattering, go on,” said J.C.

“Stop flirting,” said Anna.

We both pretended not to hear her. J.C put his hand under his chin, shifting ever so slightly toward me. “But couldn't you just try it?”

“Try what?”

“Moving here, becoming Taiwanese. Your Chinese is so good already, you could just see what it's like, couldn't you?”

“I mean—I'd like to.” I had been thinking about it. Something felt different about Taipei. In every other country I'd ever visited, people-watching had been mere fantasy. It would have taken divine intervention to blend into Germany, for instance; I could only become someone named Heide or Anneliese if I had been born an entirely different person. But in Taipei, I had the raw materials, so to speak.

It would be very difficult. It would demand starting over—not only with my citizenship, my school enrollment, my bank account, my primary care doctor, but with the whole socialization process, coming into being in a different language. But there would be such pleasure in this. I would be introduced to a whole new world of culture: new children's books to read, series to become obsessed with, television shows to watch. My first year in college I had mourned that I couldn't be entertained by my favorite books like I used to—it seemed everything was stale, that my best adventures were over. But I could have a second adolescence in Chinese. And as my fluency increased, I had intensifying fantasies about my doppelgänger in Taipei: a person who didn't have to regain her Chinese but had rather always had it; a parallel self who was unburdened with my inadequacies, who did not repeat halting greetings to her grandparents over video, who did not have to tentatively ask her parents if today was perhaps a holiday but had celebrated Lunar New Year her whole life at home with a large, happy family.

“I don't know,” said Anna. “I think that's kind of judgmental.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Like, why hide who you are? You're not Taiwanese, you're American; you're just like the rest of us.”

“That's not what I was trying to say.”

“But that's just how you act here. You get so embarrassed if we do anything wrong. You're literally always going on about it. Like the other day, you actually snapped at me for not sorting out the recycling.”

I felt Anna was being very aggressive for no reason. “They care a lot about recycling here.”

“It was just a used tissue, it wasn't the end of the world.”

J.C's head kept swiveling between us. He sensed, we both sensed, that the dynamic had polarized. He had been asked to judge between us, like Paris and the goddesses, and that was ridiculous, and it was all Anna's fault.

Diplomatically he said, “I think it's pretty natural to want to blend in where you are. It's like a survival mechanism, right?”

“I guess.” Anna shrugged.

“Right.” I wished they'd just change the subject. J.C hadn't understood me either—not at all.

That afternoon as I walked home, I thought about all the reasons why I didn't like Anna.

Over the past three weeks I had accumulated quite a number of grievances. This was perhaps less mature than just telling her about them when they came up, but reviewing them made me feel righteous. If ever the matter went to court—boy, did I have charges.

1. Anna always crammed for her vocabulary quizzes early in the morning, and she did this by repeating all of her new terms at full volume, overenunciating every tone like she was singing in the Peking opera, even though she knew I was trying to sleep.

2. I was fairly certain that she was peeing in the shower, although we had both agreed not to do this. She promised she wasn't, but I smelled it sometimes when I showered after she did—a faint ammonia lingering in the air.

3. She was not respecting the bed. We had agreed that we would not get into the bed without showering first, since due to the sweat and the mosquito repellent, we were covered in various oils all the time. I clung fastidiously to this rule, but Anna regularly came home from class and flopped over, facedown, atop the comforter. “It's just the top,” she said, in the same tone some guys would say “It's just the tip.” I tried to explain why it still mattered, but she didn't believe me, and now the bed was covered in yellow, Anna-shaped stains.

4. She had bought a pair of leather sandals, and she for whatever reason always brought these leather sandals inside, so that they stank up the entire room. I asked her to leave her shoes in the hallway, where I left my shoes, and she told me that everyone's feet smelled in the summer.

5. Every few days she complained that the food in Taipei was making her fat, that her shorts were feeling tight, and that she was going to start being careful about how much she ate. But she didn't want to throw away the soft drinks and taro milk breads she'd stashed in the fridge, so she kept trying to foist them off on me. Please, she would say, eat them, someone has to. But why should I eat them? Why didn't it matter if I got fat?

6. Despite (5), she had developed a fondness for scallion nougat crackers—a popular Taiwanese snack, two savory water crackers flavored with green onion sandwiching a bit of cream. I liked the nougat crackers too, but Anna was obsessed with them. She brought a new box home every few days and crunched through them as she studied, leaving oily streaks all over the bed, the table, the floor. I had witnessed her wiping her fingers along the table while she read; I had offered her a tissue, to which she had responded, “No, I'm good.”

She left traces of herself everywhere and thought that because this was not home, it didn't matter. But I lived here too. I would have to live here for the next seven weeks, and I was drowning in her filth, and she didn't care.

Skipper had found himself a Taiwanese girlfriend. Her name was Tingting. She was an engineering student at NTU, she was taking summer courses to graduate early, and she and Skipper had locked eyes at the dumpling stand in the student center. Now I saw them together all over campus, usually walking with Skipper's hand stuffed into Tingting's back pocket, resting comfortably on her ass cheek.

Skipper asked me and J.C, rather formally, if we would meet him and Tingting for dinner. I was flattered that he thought of us as a unit. We said of course, pick a time and place. Skipper was thrilled.

He told us that Tingting wanted Italian food. She knew a place; he would text us the address. This was how we wound up at I'm Pasta, the restaurant with that delightful nonsense sign. Skipper and J.C ordered the “beef cubes tomato pasta.” Tingting ordered the “tomato cream risotto.” I ordered the “spicy pesto vege,” which, according to the picture, came with sautéed cabbage.

Tingting had pin-straight black hair, thinly plucked eyebrows, and perfect English. She had done summer camps in Los Angeles in high school—her parents loved California; they'd been to Disneyland three times. She had been planning to do an exchange semester at Brown next spring, but now that she had met Skipper, she was thinking about coming to Yale instead. Did we like New Haven? Was it true about the crime rates? Was New Haven safe for women at night? She thought Skipper's work with the Department of Defense was very important—she was glad more Americans were taking Taiwan's defense needs seriously.

“I guess you're his long-haired dictionary,” said J.C.

“His what?”

“His long-haired dictionary. That's the joke, right? You find a Chinese girlfriend when you're abroad, and then you have a dictionary.”

“I am not a dictionary,” said Tingting. “I don't help Skipper with his homework.”

“No offense,” said J.C.

“Skipper's Chinese is very good,” said Tingting.

“No, I'm sure it is.” J.C leaned back, bemused.

Skipper lifted a beef cube to his mouth, and Tingting squeezed his hand.

I was struck by how protective they were of each other. They sat with their bodies angled, forming a defensive wall against us—like this was a press conference, like they were daring us to make fun of them. If only President and Madame Chiang Kai-shek had had their energy, I thought. Then the Nationalists would have won the war.

“So they're kind of weird, right?” said J.C as we walked to the metro stop.

But I was touched. Would anyone ever love me like that?

Was I pretty?

Was I pretty in Asia?

These were different questions. In America, you could be pretty with tanned skin and curves. In Taipei, there was one beauty standard, and it beamed out at me from every store window, magazine cover, and television screen.

It was plastered to the label of every product at Watsons, every face mask and moisturizer and skin-whitening cream. The standard was prepubescent celestial fairy: pale porcelain skin and shiny black hair; no boobs; wan, elegant smiles; toothy grins only if your teeth were platinum-white. Sometimes a pigmented pink swipe under the eyes—just a hint of conjunctivitis. The internet informed me that this was the douyin style of eye makeup.

The point was to look like a concubine in a Chinese drama—someone constantly at risk of assassination by a rival, or of committing suicide for failing to bear the emperor a son.

Tingting was pretty in Asia: Her ankles were slim, her wrists tiny, and her skin so pale I could trace the blue veins in her cheeks.

I kept seeing an advertisement for a women's athletics brand all over the city: a young woman wearing a lilac running jacket, leaning against a brick wall. Here was proof that marketing worked, because the more I encountered this ad, the more I wished I had that figure, that my body was composed only of straight lines. The woman was grinning, but she had a hapless slouch to her shoulders.

It doesn't matter how many weights I lift or how many miles I run, she said. Alas, I will always be this dainty.

I tried once to imitate that slouch. Something stirred inside me—a kind of submissive coquetry. Startled, I hugged my arms across my chest and kept walking.

I asked Margrit how you knew if you were falling in love with someone. I had just learned the relevant phrase in Modern Taiwanese Literature: to Chinese text, to literally “love” + “on” someone, which in my mind looked like hanging your heart on a hook. How did you know something was there? How did you get the other party to respond?

“I met my fiancé when we were in high school,” said Margrit. “There was never a question of will we, won't we. From the first moment we met, we understood we were two halves of a whole. So you see, I have always enjoyed a relationship of mutual infatuation. Helmut and I feel very lucky in this regard. We have never experienced the angst of adolescent romance. Everything has been . . .” She made a leveling motion with her hand. “What is the word?”

“Stable,” I supplied.

“Yes! Stable. Like an economy can be stable. Anyways, this problem was resolved for me long ago.” She patted my shoulder. “I'm sorry that's not more helpful.”

None of this mattered anyhow, because the main impediment to looking pretty was that I was always wet.

It didn't matter whether it was raining or not. I was wet even on the clear, bright days. I could never tell if it was sweat or condensation, but I always wore a slick second skin. Showering barely helped.

It did get rid of the sweat, temporarily, but then it was impossible to get dry. Anna had blown a fuse with her hair dryer during our first week, and now we were both too scared to use it. Our towels were always damp, and our apartment was so humid that air drying never worked. Showering just turned everything in the bathroom wet—the sink, all our toiletries, even the toilet paper, if we had not remembered to remove it from the holder and place it outside the bathroom.

The tile floor took the entire day to dry, which meant the only time the bathroom was remotely comfortable was the moment we came home from the department. Otherwise we padded around in standing water and dried our feet as best we could on a soggy, mildewed bathmat.

I told myself I would have to simply adjust to a different state of being. My parents were from coastal provinces; they had grown up in the heat. Maybe over time my body would adapt to my environment and my pores would shrink and my sweat glands would dry up and my ankles would get slimmer, and I would be like the Taiwanese girls I saw on the metro wearing long sleeves on a summer day without any stains on their armpits. The capacity for all of this was in my D.N.A. But the transformation was still incomplete; as it was, I felt trapped inside my skin, and all my irritations simmered underneath with nowhere to go.

On Friday, Anna and I took the bus to Fembooks, a queer and feminist bookstore in Gongguan. We had been invited to a literary event by Rayer, our Marxist teaching assistant from last semester. Rayer had emailed us earlier in the week. She'd just remembered we were coming to Taipei. Had we settled in all right? She was doing a presentation on queer Taiwanese fiction on Friday at eight, and she would love if we came by.

When we reached the location indicated on our navigation app, we found a long line snaking down the sidewalk. We were impressed—so Rayer was a bigger deal than we had realized. We waited for ten minutes until I showed someone the event link and asked if they were here for the presentation. “No, no.” They pointed. There was a music hall next door.

They were queueing for a concert. No one knew what event I was talking about. Anna asked where Fembooks was, and someone else pointed to a door farther down the block.

The bookstore sat at the top of a long, narrow staircase. It was a single spacious room: well-lit, mint-green walls lined with white bookshelves. The only person inside was a girl reading on a stool by the corner.

She wore a crocheted scoop-neck and neat white sandals that peeked from below her swishy white skirt. She was very pretty, and I perhaps stared at her a moment longer than I should have. She was flipping through a translated edition of Joan Didion's The White Album. I had read only a little of The White Album for a seminar on the modern essay, from which I learned that Didion had a lot of judgments about California, that her husband had died of a heart attack, and that she was not a feminist. I wondered how those concepts had traveled in Taiwan. I wondered what this girl thought about Joan Didion, what relevance Didion had to her life, whether Didion's ruminations on the sixties in California illuminated anything to her or if they were as far away as Bai Xianyong's ruminations on postwar Taipei were to me.

Anna asked her, in Chinese, “Are you here for Rayer's reading?”

The girl looked up. “There's a reading?”

“Yeah, our teacher is talking.” Anna didn't have the Chinese for “teaching assistant,” so she used a phrase that implied that Rayer was our professor.

“Oh, I see.” The girl glanced around for a moment. Then she placed the Joan Didion back on the shelf and picked up her bag.

After she left, we were the only people in the store. I checked and rechecked Rayer's email, in case we'd gotten the time wrong. Eventually a bookseller emerged from a back room.

Anna asked her where the bathroom was, and the bookseller pointed her down the hall. I turned my head sideways, trying to see how many of the titles I could read. The calligraphic font made it difficult. Something Something My Life. Something Something Modern Society. I kept picking books off display stands and putting them back down, unsure what I was looking for.

The covers featured many abstract line drawings of breasts and vaginas and photographs of slender Chinese women in pantsuits, arms crossed, teeth flashing.

Rayer arrived a few minutes after eight. She seemed really happy to see us—she bounded over and hugged us, like we were close friends and not former students. “You came!” she cried, in English. “How are you finding the program?”

“It's so rigorous,” said Anna. “We're exhausted.”

“It's worth it, though; it's amazing for your Chinese. Are you staying at Taipei Paradise?”

We explained about the apartment, and our landlord, and how we'd read that Yongkang Street was one of the coolest neighborhoods in Taipei.

“Awesome,” said Rayer. “That's the way to do it. You can't spend all your time around American students, or you never get the immersive experience.”

A handful of people trickled into the store. We assembled around a conference table, and the bookseller turned on a projector. A slide read “Rayer Chang, PhD Student in East Asian Languages and Literatures.”

The bookseller stood up to address us. “We're very glad to have Rayer with us tonight,” she said. “Last year, I was just minding my register when this young woman came in and asked if she could work here part-time. I had never had an American student ask if she could work in my store! It's very gratifying to see Americans take such interest in Taiwanese literature. This summer, Rayer came back and asked if anyone would read through some queer Taiwanese novels for her studies, so we found some store regulars to form a reading group.”

The bookseller introduced the three other people at the table, who were in turn a publicist, a social media manager, and a graduate student in film and media studies. Anna and I traded an impressed look. It seemed so mature and bold to form a reading group with absolute strangers, and even more so to do this in another language, in another country.

“Now Rayer will summarize some of her insights for us,” said the bookseller.

Rayer stepped up to a lectern and began explaining to us, in Chinese, the novels she had read.

She began with Chen Ruoxi's novel Paper Marriage. I knew about this novel! It had inspired Ang Lee's film The Wedding Banquet, which is about a gay Taiwanese American man who fake-marries his Chinese tenant so she can get a green card, and so he can convince his conservative parents that he is happily married to a woman. But he accidentally impregnates her during a drunken tryst on the night of their wedding, and hijinks ensue. Rayer explained that Paper Marriage wasn't technically a queer novel, since it was written by a heterosexual woman.

But perhaps heterosexual women could access a kind of queerness in their own way. For instance, could we not judge the strategy of marrying to resist the violence of borders a queer act of defiance against the heteronormative institution of marriage? An undocumented immigrant was queer. A tenant who could not pay their rent was queer.

In fact, Rayer argued, anyone who fell outside the strictures of the neoliberal heteronormative state was queer.

“Huh.” Anna raised her hand, but the bookseller said that Rayer would take all questions at the end.

Next, Rayer told us about Zhu Tianwen's novel Notes of a Desolate Man. Another title I had heard of! This one I had read in translation for a Contemporary Chinese Fiction class. I didn't like it very much, because it struck me as a mawkish, stereotypical account of a homosexual man with a sex addiction whose friends were dying of AIDS. I liked it even less when I read that the author was a straight woman (Rayer seemed only to have read straight women writing about gay men). While researching a term paper about this book, I had found that a lot of other critics disliked the text precisely because it portrayed gay Taiwanese men exclusively as sex addicts dying of AIDS. According to Rayer, this book was a meditation on the aesthetic shallowness of globalization, and the sex addiction was a metaphor for rampant consumerism.

She moved on to a book I hadn't heard of. It had a dark cover that looked a bit like a vagina and a bit like the sea. “Now, this text is really interesting, because it is one of the first Taiwanese texts to linger in the—in the . . .” She stumbled, then reached for her phone. She blinked at her notes. “To linger . . .” Her cheeks flushed red. “Sorry,” she said, in English. “One second.”

“The female gaze,” supplied the bookseller.

“Right,” said Rayer. “As I was saying—this text lingers in the female gaze, an—an eroticism, without the men.”

But she had lost the thread. Her stuttering continued; her pauses grew longer. I could see beads of sweat forming on her temples.

The minutes crept toward nine o'clock. Rayer kept going, but it was clear she could not actually converse about these topics fluently in Chinese; she could only read her notes off her phone. She gave us more examples of how straight women could be queer, and then she moved on to arguing that novels about queer men were really a metaphor for the relationship between Taiwan and mainland China.

As she wrapped up, she mentioned that these novels would form the backbone of her dissertation.

This horrified me. How much of those novels had Rayer comprehended? If she couldn't even speak of them fluently in Chinese, how could she write about them in enough detail to produce original scholarship? I had enough difficulty with the books I read in English. I didn't feel remotely qualified to write a monograph about them.

It occurred to me that, over the course of the semester, I had never actually heard Rayer speak at length in Chinese. She was always reading vocabulary words off a prepared list or asking us to read sentences out loud from the textbook. Of course, her Chinese was better than ours, but that still did not count as good.

But if even Rayer, who was a graduate student and had spent the whole summer talking with Taiwanese friends and reading Taiwanese literature, could not articulate a basic sentence about a book she had read, then what hope did the rest of us have?

At last Rayer concluded her slides. Everyone clapped. The bookseller turned off the projector, and Rayer stepped away from the lectern. I couldn't tell how she felt about how things had gone.

Her cheeks were still flushed, and she had a loopy shine in her eyes. She was breathing hard, like she had just stepped off a treadmill.

“That was so interesting,” Anna told her. “Especially the part on Paper Marriage. I liked your argument that the straight woman is queer too.”

“Right? Queerness is such an expansive label.” Rayer zipped up her bag. “We're heading to a bar, do you want to come?”

“We have a lot of homework,” said Anna, which was true.

“Sure, no worries.” Rayer hugged us again and insisted that we stay in touch. She was staying in Taipei for the rest of the summer doing dissertation research. We had to let her take us out to dinner. She knew some great Michelin-starred places; we had to go try this vegetarian dim sum with mushroom-based Peking roast duck. We were to reach out if we needed anything, anything at all. She would email us.

Anna and I didn't say anything until we were a block away from the bookstore. That night, in the heat, Taipei seemed more inaccessible than ever. I couldn't decode a single neon-lit sign.

“Maybe she's bad at public speaking,” said Anna.

“She didn't know the word for 'penis,'” I said.

I'd always trusted that knowing Chinese would be useful in some professional sense, but now it seemed the options were more limited than I'd thought. I did not want to embarrass myself in academia, like Rayer, or work in military intelligence, like Skipper. So what good was my Chinese?

Early in the spring I had attended an East Asian Studies career panel at the university job fair. The panelist who had studied Chinese was a white man named Henry who worked at a think tank in D.C. Everyone else gave opening remarks about the many opportunities that Japanese and Korean had opened up for them, but Henry told us he had to be straight with us. “The heyday of Sino-American relations is over,” he said. “Covid killed it all. The expat zones are dead. Economic growth has slowed, the business boom has ended, and foreign offices aren't hiring.

Education consulting firms are being shut down, which means you can't even get jobs as private English tutors. I mean, just look at where people are going to study abroad. How many of you have heard of this one program in Taipei?”

A dozen of us raised our hands.

“Right,” said Henry. “It used to be that nobody went to that program unless they were interested specifically in Classical Chinese. The Taipei program was the ugly stepchild of Chinese language programs. The gold standard used to be a course in Beijing. But no one wants to go to Beijing anymore, it's just not safe enough. Everyone wants to go to Taiwan, because it's under American protection, but who knows how long that will last? This president doesn't care about Taiwan; this president will give dictators whatever they want, and soon Taiwan will go the way of Hong Kong and then we will all be fucked.”

According to Henry, we were on an accelerated path to a great power conflict, and the channels of communication between East and West were fraying by the day. “Learning professional Chinese is now the domain of two types of people,” he declared. “Wen or wu. Literature or war. Scholars reading ancient, irrelevant Chinese novels in the ivory tower, or the D-O-D. Take your pick.”

That rattled me. All the attendees at that job fair had been hoping to live some kind of transpacific existence—to move back and forth between worlds. But if Henry was right, then this movement was no longer possible, and our only career option was to prepare for war.

We had been warned in orientation that we weren't supposed to ask our teachers about politically sensitive issues. We might make them uncomfortable, or even worse, get them in trouble with the government. But Teacher Sun didn't seem to care. She liked to bring up topics with no clear relevance to my readings, just to make me squirm. Did I think the United States was right to sell weapons to Taiwan? Did I think the United States would really protect Taiwan in case of an invasion? Did I think the United States was a democracy? I tried to be considerate in my answers, but no matter what I said, Teacher Sun found it hilarious. “Of course you think that,” she always said. “You're American!”

One time I asked if she supported Taiwanese independence, and she cackled. “Why would I want that?”

“Because you're Taiwanese?”

“I am not Taiwanese! That is to say—I am Taiwanese, but I'm Chinese too. Do you want to know where I'm from?” On her screen, she pulled up a map of mainland China. She circled some provinces in the northwest with her pointer. “My father—here. My mother—here. Our ancestral graves are in China. My whole culture is rooted in China. This place is home. This land. And you want me to be independent from that?”

“Then do you think that China should rule Taiwan?”

She cackled again. “No! I think the Taiwanese government should rule China!”

This floored me. I had never met anyone with this view. From what I understood, the soldiers who fled the mainland after 1949 had kept promising to retake it one day, but as time went on everyone gave up on that dream. For Taiwan to rule the mainland seemed as farfetched as the state government of Hawaii taking over the continental United States.

“Do you think that's realistic in our lifetimes?”

Teacher Sun sighed theatrically. “Look. None of us could have predicted what happened in our lifetimes. Who could have anticipated the Communists? Who could have known they would take over the mainland? Who could have known the Nationalists would impose martial rule, and then who could have known Taiwan would become a democracy? What happened in the past few decades was unimaginable.” Here she used a phrase that she had been drilling me on—Chinese text, “that which cannot be imagined or comprehended”—and thumped the desk. “Who knew the Berlin Wall would fall?

That the Soviet Union would break apart? That China would open up? Who knew any of this would happen?” She flung up her hands. “So who knows?”

When I thought through everything I knew about China, and America, and great power politics, and semiconductors and Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, I really could not see a way forward from our current plight. But I liked Teacher Sun's optimism. It was the simple logic that what goes up must come down. If history could smash maps and close borders and scatter families across the world, if history could cause all this destruction in the span of several decades, why wouldn't the tides turn back?

Why couldn't the authoritarians lose power? Why couldn't the exiled go home?

When I stepped out of the shower, I caught Anna scrolling through my phone.

“What are you doing?”

She set it down, quickly enough that I knew she knew she'd done something wrong. “I was just having a look.”

She used the double verb construction for “look”—Chinese text, kàn kàn—which in Chinese could lessen the weight of a verb. To 看 was intense; to Chinese text was innocent; no big deal. But this was a big deal, and the shock of betrayal was paired with a searing satisfaction—that I was right to hate her, that all my irritation was earned.

I unlocked my phone. She'd been looking through my texts with J.C. He had asked me what I wanted to have next for lunch—the Korean bibimbap place or the Singaporean noodle shack. How had I handled the Chongqing hot pot, ha ha. Sweat emoji, poop emoji.

“I saw he texted you,” said Anna, like this justified anything.

“But that's my phone.”

“Well, you know I like him.”

“But you can't just look through other people's phones.”

We had lapsed back into English; our Chinese could not accommodate our shades of implicature. In English, Anna was savvier; there was an edge to her voice, the baby-doll facade fell away, and I saw the cunning behind it. She knew what she wanted, and she knew I was in the way. Anna had a better read on the situation than I'd thought.

“But it's nothing private, right?” Her tone was forced, chipper. “Like, you guys just have lunch?”

“But, Anna.” I wanted to slap that brazen look off her face. My sister Flora wore that look all the time—when she raided my art supplies, read my diary, or borrowed my clothes without asking. It was the look of haughty entitlement. All my things were hers. “You just—I mean, this is a very big invasion of privacy. You can't do that.”

“Okay, I'm sorry.” She waved her hands. “That was wrong, I'm so tired, I wasn't thinking.” But she said this in a brisk, cheery tone, as if what transpired had been a glitch, as if she hoped I'd just forget about it. She was not sorry at all.

But she was extra solicitous over the next few days, buying me bubble teas and tofu puddings without asking, and she stopped leaving her shoes inside the apartment, so I tried to stop being mad at her. We still had to live together, and I couldn't be looking over my shoulder all the time. The Cold War's Schrödinger resolutions made sense to me now. Some conflicts were better left alone.

The next Monday we were required to attend an afternoon guest lecture about Taiwanese politics by someone named Professor Liao, a researcher at Academia Sinica. None of us had any interest in Taiwanese politics, but we were still excited for the lecture. All new encounters were tests of our language capabilities. If we could comprehend a full lecture in Chinese, then, wow—we were truly on the path to fluency.

I was feeling pretty good when Professor Liao began the lecture, because he said lots of platitudes about how excited he was to be speaking with American students, how wonderful it was that we were committed to learning Chinese and to furthering the Sino-American relationship. Those were easy phrases; we'd heard them a dozen times. But then he got to the matter at hand, and I couldn't understand him at all.

The problem was that he kept circling back to a certain keyword, but I didn't know what it meant. I thought it had to do with the local electoral system. Something about recalling elected officials. Something about corruption.

When I looked up the phrase in my dictionary app, I only got definitions of the individual words, but they didn't add up to anything intelligible. It was clearly a term of art, but without context, I couldn't puzzle it out.

I could understand all the words around that phrase, the connective tissue. What I understood: This Thing was of immense contemporary import. The Thing was at the center of intense academic disagreement. I even understood, because I had learned the grammatical structure that morning, that the Thing was of paramount importance to all related actors.

I could tell, from the blank expressions around me, that no one else knew what the Thing was either. Professor Liao made a point, and we all nodded. He asked if there were any questions before he moved on, and we all shook our heads.

We had all mastered the uncomprehending nod and smile, the face you put on when you had no idea what the other person was saying, or when you had blanked out and now couldn't find your way back into the sentence. The smile was discreet. You couldn't smile too big or seem too excited, or it would seem like you had an opinion. But since we were all so good at this smile, Professor Liao thought we knew exactly what he was talking about.

As he finished his lecture, Professor Liao told us that he was so impressed with our commitment to Chinese. “You should be very proud of yourselves,” he said. “Your language abilities are truly remarkable. I've delivered this lecture just as if I were speaking to undergraduates here in Taiwan. So if you could understand this, then you are fluent enough to take university courses in Chinese.” He asked again if there were any questions, but nobody raised their hand.

In my one-on-one class, I kept getting stuck on the gap between the technically correct sentence and the sentence that a native speaker would compose.

My frustration was compounded by the fact that Chinese didn't have rules of grammar. At least, Chinese didn't have rules that paralleled the extensive grammatical skeletons of Latin or other Romance languages. Chinese didn't have masculine or feminine forms. Chinese verbs weren't conjugated, nor did they have tenses. To say “I run” or “I am running” or “I have run” or “I ran,” you would use the same characters: Chinese text, “I” + “run.” You had to add other words—clues about time, when you started doing something or when you ended it—to make clear when this action occurred.

But this didn't mean Chinese followed no rules at all. There were distinct parts of speech, and accepted ways of combining those parts of speech. You learned these through pattern recognition, which was why so much of class was spent fitting new words to patterns, and why we had to replicate these patterns in our essays. But there were always exceptions to the patterns, and you wouldn't know about these exceptions until someone told you they were wrong. But even then, they might not give you a reason they were wrong. Sometimes, when Teacher Sun corrected my phrasing, her only explanation was that “It's not how a Chinese person would say it. It just sounds weird.”

All this meant that there was no systematic way to go about studying Chinese. In high school Latin classes, I had gone from the general to the particular. In studying Chinese, I had to go from the particular to the general. It was all trial and error, a game of volume: You had to throw yourself at the language over and over again and hope you absorbed enough unwritten rules that eventually your one-on-one teacher stopped laughing at you.

None of this would have been necessary had I simply learned Chinese the way I was supposed to. Had I learned Chinese the way a child did, at a child's pace, and with a child's expansive brain, I could have avoided the shameful diaspora adolescence—the nervous giggle, the “sorry, my Chinese is very not good,” the disappointed elders, the menus I couldn't read, the tattoos I couldn't translate. My mother loved sending me WeChat videos of white men reciting Tang poetry with perfect Beijing accents. “Look,” she would say, “isn't that impressive?” If these gringos could pick it up, why couldn't I?

But where would I have picked it up? Who would have taught me?

There was Chinese school on Sundays, held in classrooms rented at the local community college where we dug our pencils into dried gum stuck to the bottoms of our desks and tried not to perish from boredom while my friend Michelle's father led us through recitations of pinyin vowel-consonant combinations in all four tones and taught us the stroke orders of the most common radicals. We traced the simplest characters again and again inside printed square boxes: Chinese text; one, two, up, down. The classroom atmosphere was authoritarian, as I presumed Michelle's father's village education had been.

It was important to our parents that we get a taste for the old country discipline. We were expected to stand in unison and yell, “Hello, Teacher!” when class began, and then to bow and shout, “Thank you, Teacher!” once the interminable three hours were over.

Once, Michelle's father caught me doodling under my desk, and he made me pass my sketchbook around the room for everyone to see. “Explain what this is!” he shouted. I had drawn Luke Skywalker, except he was a cowboy, and he was riding on a horse with me, dressed as Maid Marian, the fox version, and his hands were around my waist, and I had boobs. But since I couldn't say any of those things in Chinese, all I could manage was “I had a dream.”

There were recitations—so many recitations. Every few weeks we were handed a snippet of classical Chinese literature—a passage from the Analects, a line from the Zhuangzi, a piece of Tang poetry—and made to memorize it for a ceremonial recitation before an audience of all our classmates and their parents. Generations of children before us had learned Chinese by memorizing the classics.

This practice would instill the music, the rhythm, of our language in our bones. But the only thing that stuck with me years later was a poem written by a seven-year-old about swimming geese, and then only the first line of that poem: Geese, geese, geese!

You couldn't learn Chinese this way. This wasn't a lived language. This was a source of shame, an eye roll, a minute hand ticking through molasses.

This was stroke orders traced a thousand times without ever leaving an imprint on our minds, and Tang poetry memorized in a blind panic in cold, musty hallways. This was words written on water.

The worst part was how my parents adored these recitations. The geese poem thrilled them. The Analects nearly drove them to tears. I could see it in their eyes: They were dreaming of four-square courtyards and village schools.

And when we drove home, when my sisters and I resumed chattering in English, it felt like a terrible indulgence. I knew what my parents longed for: a parallel set of daughters, locked into the safe conservativism of their past, who weren't corrupted by American values, who didn't suffer these baffling American disorders. But I couldn't give that to them, not unless I traveled back in time and stopped them from coming here in the first place.

Most of my friends from freshman year were studying abroad this summer, but I was the only one studying a language my parents spoke. Everyone else was posting enviable photos from Barcelona, or Paris, or Berlin—cities of boundless possibility, portals to another world where they didn't know anyone or have any family, where their parents' rivals from high school could not call them fat. The Spanish Civil War was really so crazy, posted my friend Isabelle, waving from atop Montjuïc Castle.

I was so jealous of all the people who studied a foreign language just because it was foreign. Imagine just picking a language at random—Spanish, French, German, anything—and plopping yourself in a place where no one expected you to even know the word for “bread,” and where people were awed if you just managed to say un vermut, gracias. Imagine studying a language that only represented difference.

History that felt like fiction. Vocabulary that didn't unlock memories of shouting in the night. What would that be like?

It was not happening fast enough.

I wanted the world of symbols to open up to me the way they did in English. I wanted to look out on a street and not have to pause to parse out the signs one by one. I wanted to understand, in a single glance: Here was the ophthalmologist, here were microloans for seniors, here were voting instructions for the upcoming elections. I wanted to eavesdrop on the metro and grasp the full context of a conversation. I didn't want to strain my mind looking at the Starbucks menu. I wanted to crash through this barrier, but I couldn't speed up my daily drip of vocabulary, and it didn't matter how diligently I tore through my flash cards; I still had to pause and squint, sorting through my mental catalog of radicals until I could recognize the label for lavender syrup.

I was developing something that I called the exposure theory of language: that language was primarily absorbed through daily interaction, by inferring connections between things the way that Helen Keller had inferred the hand signal for water by feeling it under the pump. Everything you learned in a language classroom just put a name to connections you'd already apprehended. When we learned what verbs were in English class, it wasn't like we discovered actions for the first time—we just finally learned the name for that category of word.

The solution, then: Exposure, endless exposure. Walking around, processing the background noise, soaking in the interactions, imitating the locals like a parrot until it felt natural. Could I do this in just ten weeks? Could I ever manage to sound like I was from here?

When I mentioned this to J.C and Anna, J.C declared that we needed to make better use of our free time.

“We have to go out more! We have to go on day trips! We have to get out of Taipei—it's actually criminal that we haven't left the city center yet.”

He showed us his phone. There was an app that collated all the best discounts on nearby cultural experiences. Did we want to go get massages at the Village Spa? Take a ride on the Maokong Gondola? Hire a private car to tour the Taroko Gorge?

“Lily feels guilty about spending fellowship money,” said Anna. She had joined us at lunch once again, as her one-on-one instructor kept canceling with suspicious frequency.

Anna was being spiteful. I had told her the night before that I didn't think Taiwan's Ministry of Education wanted to pay for a NT$3,000 silk blouse, not that we shouldn't spend our cash at all.

“The fellowship is for cultural enrichment,” said J.C. “Squandering it is the point. And some of these packages are stupid cheap—I mean, look at this.” He stopped scrolling. “A luxury room at a hot springs resort in Beitou. This is a crazy deal! It's like, fifty bucks a night!” He showed us a series of promotional images on his phone: tatami mats; a breakfast buffet; a group of pretty women wrapped in white towels, laughing as they dipped their toes in what looked like radioactive green water. “Do you want to go?”

“It's kind of hot out for hot springs,” said Anna.

“I think they have cold springs too.” J.C clicked through to the booking page. “Come on, let's do it. It's only an hour out by train.”

I wasn't sure what to say. One year into college, I was still struggling with my new autonomy. I hated to deviate from a routine of waking early, studying hard, and going to sleep in my own bed. The most daring thing I had done last semester was stay out late after a Broadway show with a group of girls from my floor, and though we were safely home by two in the morning, I felt a sick dread the entire time. I wasn't afraid I would get in trouble—how would my parents find out?—but I felt a moral horror, like I was losing my discipline and virtue and being corrupted to the ways of sloth.

“There's only one bed,” said Anna.

“But the one room is only fifty dollars,” said J.C. “That's like—sixteen per person; that's a crazy discount.”

Anna and I looked at each other. I could read her face; we were working through the same logics. Did we all want to share a bed? What if only one of us shared a bed with J.C, and the other had to sleep alone on the floor? What if one of us didn't go, and the other got to share a bed with J.C? Anyhow, I did not want to be the kind of person who was prudish about sleeping in the same room as a boy, or who was closed off to new and suspiciously affordable cultural experiences.

“Fine,” I said.

“Fine,” Anna echoed quickly. “When?”

“This Saturday.” J.C was so excited, totally blind to our psychodrama. “I'll book it right now.”

The forecast promised rainstorms for the next five days, and this indeed meant five consecutive days in which we never once saw the sun. The city was cloaked in a humid gray. The rain was never a light drizzle.

Always it announced itself with a crack of thunder, and then it came down in thick, violent sheets, against which umbrellas and rain jackets were useless. At best they kept our textbooks dry, but the rain hammered from all angles, sometimes flying horizontal, so that whenever we got where we were going, we were soaked through except around our necks.

Water pooled five, six inches on the streets. Our shoes were never dry. We left them out on the windowsill, but no matter how long they sat, they remained damp and ice cold.

We bought ugly plastic flip-flops that were waterproof, but they gave us blisters between our toes. At the department, the hallways were filled with the squelches of feet padding in soaked shoes. In class we sat shivering, lips blue and toes pruney.

We were not allowed to turn the heat on. This was department policy. We couldn't have heat in the summer, it was energy inefficient.

How could anyone live like this? How could the sky hold so much water? When would it end?

“Rainy season,” Teacher Sun said, gazing out the window. “Did you know it rains in Taipei for two-thirds of the year?”

In Considering the News, we were presenting our “further research” on toilets.

We had learned that the key to keeping ourselves entertained during News was to bring the strangest nuggets of information we could find into class discussion. News was not challenging otherwise. The grammar of reportage was always simple and direct, so we got more out of class if we could get the discussion to spin out in unexpected directions. This way we picked up more interesting terms, such as “colony collapse” and “asexual reproduction.”

Our weekly reading was about how Xi Jinping had declared a Toilet Revolution in 2015: a public campaign to improve the quality of mainland China's public toilets. I was the only one in the class who had been to mainland China, so I told everyone about the toilets I had used on my childhood trips to my father's hometown—a place my sisters and I only ever referred to as “the village.” They weren't exactly pits in the ground—most of them were paved, with a flush handle or foot pedal—but you did have to squat over a hole to do your business. There was never any toilet paper. You had to buy little rectangular packets of tissue at cigarette stands and remember to tuck one in your pocket whenever you left the house.

“But this form of pooping can be good for you,” I explained. “Research indicates that squat pooping alleviates pressure on the bowels and makes it easier for poop to slide out of you. In this way, the Western seated toilet is like many conventions of imperialism. It makes things worse for no reason.”

Yuxiu told us about a volunteer program she had done with her high school class in Cambodia the summer before they graduated. They were in Cambodia to build houses for the rural poor. But since the village had no houses to begin with, she and her classmates had to sleep in tents in an open field, and they had to walk out to a patch at the edge of the woods whenever they wanted to relieve themselves. “It was this giant field of shit,” she said. “You had to dance your way across some bricks someone had thrown into the field in order to find somewhere no one else had recently shat, and then you had to hope you didn't fall in.”

Baodeng told us about women in India who would stop consuming liquids at a certain point in the day so that they would not have to use public toilets after dark, because they feared they might be raped.

We all emphatically agreed with Xi Jinping on this one: toilet access was a fundamental human right.

As it happened, the toilet in our apartment was clogged. It wouldn't flush. A little bit of water would trickle in when I pulled the handle, and then the yellow pulpy mess in the bowl would stir a little, rising higher than it had been before. “Don't use the bathroom,” I warned Anna, and sat down to text Lee. Lee apologized: He was not in town today, but he could come tomorrow with a plumber. He asked if we had been flushing toilet paper down the pipes, and the only honest answer I could give was, Maybe?

I knew this could not be my fault, because I had carefully heeded Lee's instructions. I always wiped myself and then folded my used toilet paper twice so that when we took out the trash bag, we wouldn't have to touch the waste. I knew Anna did not do this, because I saw squares with brown and yellow streaks at the top of the wastebasket all the time.

I asked Anna if she had been flushing toilet paper by accident.

“Of course not,” she said.

“Well, neither have I, so how did they get clogged?”

“They're old pipes,” said Anna. “Of course they're going to get clogged.”

There were no public toilets in the building, so we had to run out to Youmoutoohana to pee. But Youmoutoohana closed at eleven, and then what would we do? The restroom in the park was only a two-minute walk away, but this seemed an insurmountable distance in the dark.

I always had to pee in the middle of the night. I couldn't sleep if I had even the slightest urge to pee. I had always been ashamed of my overactive bladder; it felt like a character flaw. But there was nothing I could do about that now. We had to make it to tomorrow.

I suggested we pee in plastic cups and pour them down the sink, but Anna said that was disgusting.

“The toilet isn't that full,” said Anna. “We could just keep going in the toilet and try not to fill it up.”

“But then when the plumber comes, he'll have a pile of sewage to plunge through.'

“So we'll try not to fill it up that much.”

We agreed we would just try to drink as little water as we could and hope for the best. I took a nice long pee during my shower and squeezed several pumps of body wash on the floor to help it all down the drain. There were lots of Chinese phrases that could mean “to urinate,” but the one I liked was Chinese text: little. 解: to liberate, set free, unknot. So, to pee: a little liberation, for the moment.

Paolo told me about a theory he was developing: that you couldn't lie in a language that you weren't good at.

“Think about it,” he said. “Do you ever lie in class? Even about sensitive topics?”

I had to discuss sensitive topics in class all the time. In Thought and Society, Teacher Cai was always asking us to express our opinions on various matters: whether health care should be privatized, whether the government should give women incentives to get pregnant. And I did, in fact, always try to tell the truth, even if I had to dumb down my opinion from “reproductive justice affects women in every stratum of society” to “childbirth is really hard.” I suppose I could have lied. But this seemed like extra work: First you had to make up an opinion you didn't believe in, and then you had to find the Chinese words to match.

Paolo said this wasn't what he meant. His point was rather that a low language level restored in you the naivete and innocence of a child. If your language patterns were blunt and straightforward, then so too were your thoughts. For instance, whenever he introduced himself, he said that his hobbies were films and literature. His Chinese wasn't good enough to signal taste or pretension—he only had those basic building blocks. He didn't know how to say “German expressionism” (though now he knew, because he had looked it up).

I asked him how this squared with his mission to use language as a shield. He admitted this disturbed him. “It is greater motivation to achieve fluency,” he said. “Until I can manipulate language in such a way as to hide my thoughts”—and the word he used for “manipulate” was the word for “knead,” like kneading pizza dough—“I will remain vulnerable.”

Maybe that was the problem between me and Anna. We couldn't hide anything from each other. We couldn't even be tactful, let alone deceitful. We each knew what the other wanted, and we wanted those things too much, and that was fatal.

N.T.U E-PROOF—not FOR SALE

HarperCollinsPublishers

....................................

3

The rain broke at last. We woke to warm sunlight on our faces, and Anna made me get up early so that we could walk around across the street to get steamed buns and soy milk for breakfast.

“I like Taipei again,” Anna sang. “I like my life again.”

The steamed buns were pillowy and sweet. The soy milk came scooped out of a wooden tub, and scratched my throat in a pleasant, grainy way. I must be kinder to Anna, I told myself.

She had a crush, and that was embarrassing, but she was essentially a sweet person. The sunlight made this easier to remember. I watched her nibbling her steamed bun and felt a wave of affection—the kind I would feel for a small woodland animal.

Anna left for class and I stayed at home, waiting for the laundry machine to unlock so I could hang up our clothes. I was still lounging in bed when the floor began to shake.

Something clattered inside the bathroom. I sat up, baffled. I touched my fingers to my face. I could feel the vibrations in my jaw. An earthquake? But I didn't remember what I was supposed to do during an earthquake. Something about doorways, or getting outside—which one was it? The sidewalks were so narrow; what if the buildings toppled onto me? What was worse: being crushed by rubble, or suffocating slowly in a little pocket of air? I kept thinking of a viral video about a bed designed to withstand earthquakes by transforming into a metal cage.

What good would that do?, derided the comments. Produce a steel coffin? Where you could languish for days, slowly dying from lack of food and water?

The shaking continued. I saw the water trembling in my glass—visual evidence; this was not in my head. I decided that I had time to escape. I snatched up my phone and keys and dashed down the stairs, and I had just opened the door to the outside when the tremors stopped.

I stepped barefoot into the street. Outside was bright, bewilderingly normal. Across the street, the jianbing vendor was pouring batter onto her stovetop, and a line of customers stretched around the corner, checking their phones, counting their change.

Yongkang Street was crowded as always: couples walking hand in hand, mothers pushing strollers, vendors wrapping up takeout in plastic bags. Nothing looked out of place.

Was I the only one who had felt it? I wandered down the sidewalk, unsure if I was dreaming. I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my right calf. I had left the building without spraying Off!

I went back inside. I sat on the bed and googled “Earthquake, Taipei,” but all the top results were articles from last April about how Taipei 101 had not collapsed despite a series of recent earthquakes. I tried the search in Chinese, but that also turned up nothing. How could this be? Could I have been the only one to feel the earthquake? Could earthquakes be so targeted?

My phone buzzed—J.C was calling. I answered at once. “Are you okay?”

“What?”

“Did you feel the earthquake?”

“Sorry, what?”

“The earthquake just now, did you—?”

“So here's the situation.” J.C didn't seem to have heard me. “You know the Beitou resort reservation?”

“Huh?”

“So I thought it was booked for Saturday, but I read the dates on the deal wrong, and it turns out it's actually for today. Like, this afternoon.”

“Oh,” I said. It took my thoughts a moment to catch up—I was still wondering how this was related to the earthquake. “Okay?”

“So do you still want to go?”

I almost pointed out that I had class today. But J.C must have known this, because J.C also had class every weekday, so clearly the question was whether I wanted to skip class with him.

“You can't just change the booking?”

“No, it's like a limited deal, so there aren't refunds.”

“But Anna already left for class.”

“Can you text her or something?” J.C sounded impatient. “Maybe she can join us after.”

“I mean, she's probably in class now.” I knew Anna kept her phone in her locker during the day; there was no way I could reach her until her lunch break. “Can we wait until after class?”

“I think it won't make sense to go that late in the day. We wouldn't even get there until after dark, and then it wouldn't be worth it.”

“I see.”

It occurred to me that perhaps J.C didn't want Anna to come—that perhaps her absence was the point. But did I want to go if Anna had been excluded on purpose? And if J.C didn't want Anna there, then why did he want me?

“So I would like to go,” said J.C. “I think the experience will be worth it. And I'd really like you to go too, but I think you should decide pretty quick if we're going to have a good time.” All this he said in a light and even tone, though it still seemed like he was annoyed with me.

I tried to sort out what would be more offensive: going or not going. I didn't want to ditch Anna. The trip now felt forced and stressful, not fun and spontaneous. On the other hand, it seemed rude to turn J.C down when he had already paid for the reservation. There was no middle ground here, no option that preserved every relationship the way it had been.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, let's go.”

We agreed to meet on the red line in half an hour. J.C was coming from one station over, and he texted me that he was in one of the middle cars. When the train arrived, he stepped out and waved, and I ran to his door. Rush hour was over. We had an entire row of seats to ourselves.

“Hi,” he said.

I sat down beside him and tucked my bag in between my legs. I had brought all my textbooks, just in case there was downtime—in case I got bored. “Hi.”

“Sorry for the mix-up.”

“No, that's okay. Did you feel the earthquake this morning?”

“Huh?”

“It was so crazy,” I said. “I was lying in bed and then I felt the apartment floor moving, and then things started falling off the shelf in my bathroom.”

J.C frowned. “I didn't feel anything.”

“Maybe it was just in my neighborhood?”

“Let's check.” J.C took out his phone. “There's a government website that tracks earthquakes.” He showed me his screen—the last reported earthquake had been more than two months ago. “Yeah, nothing.”

“Weird,” I said. “Maybe they haven't updated it.”

“Or maybe you dreamed it?”

“I can't have,” I said. “My stuff fell off the bathroom shelf. I saw.”

“Huh.” J.C watched me for a while, then shrugged.

I leaned forward on the bench, staring at my knees.

Why was I the only one who cared about this earthquake? Didn't anyone want to know the truth?

I felt very unsettled. Several events had occurred in rapid succession, all of them unexpected, and I didn't know what to do with that. This day was veering out of control. I had no say in anything. Things would end up how they would end up and I would just accept the consequences.

I was having a hard time processing that this was real: that I was on a train next to J.C, that we were going to spend the next two days together, alone. I thought of the party scene in Lost, when the protagonist makes eyes at the Western flapper girl, and then they go off to have sex, just like that. I felt suspended in a state of narrative disbelief, as if by virtue of being in Taipei, my life had become a film where anything could happen at any time. I could make eyes at someone, and that would be it; no deliberation, no fretting about whether he liked me back or even knew I existed. We would just go off and have sex, and then we could sit in separate corners and ponder what this meant about our national identities, our relationship to modernity, and our complicity in colonialism.

“Do you think we should write in and ask for an excused absence?” J.C asked.

This was a joke. He had used the Chinese term for taking a leave of absence: Chinese text. A funny phrase, because 請 could also mean to invite someone. So in one sense, you weren't asking for leave, you were inviting someone to give you a break.

“Ha ha,” I said.

“No but actually, should we tell the teachers we're going?”

“Probably?” I felt a surge of anxiety. I'd never broken the rules with such brazen indifference. I didn't know what the consequences would be. Suspension? Expulsion? Death?

What were we doing here? J.C and I had met only a month ago. We were not close friends. I worried that this trip was in fact a mutual dare that neither of us could back out of, a fifty-dollar sunk cost, and we were only going along with it because the booking already existed, and to not go would be more socially destabilizing than just accepting our fates.

But what were those fates? What was scripted to happen in Beitou? The obvious promise of sex hung between us, but so far J.C had made no indication that he liked me that way. When boys wanted to have sex with me, I had learned, they would initiate proceedings by finding excuses to touch me: hand to hand, skin to skin, an arm creeping around my shoulders. But J.C just sat next to me, hunched over his phone as if we were strangers.

It looked like he was playing a game involving slingshots. I pulled out my own phone and started going through my vocabulary flash cards for the week.

“Hello!” I didn't realize the old woman sitting across from us was talking to me. She said it again, more forcefully, and I glanced up.

She pointed to my water bottle. “You can't eat or drink on the subway.”

I had known about the no eating or drinking rule. I just assumed it had to do with a mask mandate, which no one was obeying at this point, or with cleanliness, which seemed to exclude water.

“Even water?”

She sighed loudly—more loudly than I felt the situation warranted—and stood up. I shrank back—I thought she was going to grab my bottle from me—but she walked over to the middle of the car and rapped her knuckles against a poster on the wall. “See here. There's a fine.”

I wasn't even drinking anymore. “Okay.”

“So you have to put that away.”

People were staring. Even the woman's husband seemed embarrassed about this exchange. He kept glancing up at us and then down at his shoes.

J.C squeezed my wrist. I tugged my arm away. I felt everyone was being a bit overfamiliar today.

“Hey.” The woman was waving to me again. Reluctantly, I glanced up. She asked, “Where are you going?”

I looked over at J.C, who said, “Beitou.”

“Beitou! Why are you going to Beitou?”

“We're looking at the hot springs.”

“Beitou,” she told her husband, as if this were ludicrous—as if they'd never in their entire lives met anyone going to Beitou. I couldn't tell if he heard her. No matter what she said, he just kept staring forward with that impassive stare unique to old Chinese men. “They're looking at hot springs. On a day like this.”

Her husband grunted. I folded my arms and pulled them tight against my chest. No one in the car spoke for the rest of the ride.

Beitou looked just like the residential neighborhoods in central Taipei, except a bit older, a bit shabbier. In my imagination I had built up the resort town to resemble a theme park, with water slides and splashing children, but we saw none of these as we dragged our bags across town from the station. The resort hotel was such a nondescript brown building that we walked back and forth past it several times before we finally found the sign on the door.

The reception desk was empty. J.C rang the bell, and several minutes passed before a young woman emerged from a back room. She seemed baffled by our presence.

“Hi,” J.C said, in Chinese.

“Checking in?” she asked, in English.

They battled for a moment—clearly she wanted to prove her fluency in English, and J.C wanted to prove his fluency in Chinese—but he didn't know the words for “promotional deal,” and so she won out. Yes, our reservation was valid. Yes, the discount was still good.

Yes, our room was ready. The hotel restaurant was on the second floor, and dinner service began at half past five.

“Are the indoor springs open now?” asked J.C.

“Of course,” said the receptionist. “They're open every day from ten to eight. But the hotel hot springs are divided between men and women. The men's are on the second floor, and the women's are on the third floor. You are free to enter the hot springs whenever you wish, but you cannot go in together.”

This made good sense to me, because sometimes hot springs were nude, and it seemed very transgressive to have men and women cavorting nude in the same space together. But J.C looked so disappointed. “There's no unisex pool?”

“Not at this hotel, no.”

“What about at the public hot springs?”

“The public springs have the same rules,” said the receptionist. “They're like that everywhere.”

“So we can't go to any hot springs together at all?”

The receptionist glanced at me, then let out a nervous giggle. “There is a private tub in your room, and the water comes straight from the springs.”

I tried to nonverbally communicate that I did not share J.C's urgent desire to soak in a hot spring together. But I could read the judgment on her face. She knew what was going on here.

Our room was much smaller than it had appeared in the photo. What had seemed to be an enormous sitting area turned out to be a narrow hallway, and there was no king-size bed, only the smallest double I'd ever seen. This seemed like a recurring scam in Taipei, and somehow I kept falling for it. There was no way we could have slept comfortably if Anna had come. Someone would have ended up on the floor.

“Give me a second.” J.C set down his backpack, dug out his toiletries bag, and went into the bathroom.

I perched on the edge of the bed, trying to decide how I wanted the rest of this day to go.

I had never once gone on a successful date in my life. I always broke down at the communication stage, even with people I liked. I couldn't answer basic questions, like whether I wanted to sit on the booth side or the seat side, or whether I wanted still or sparkling water. I never struggled to express myself on these topics in any other contexts, but once it was a date, the stakes always felt so high. It was like I had to pass an interview where the standard was proving I was a nice and normal person.

I was even worse at the business of making conversation, at getting to know the other person. None of my interlocutor's questions were ever interesting, and none of my responses communicated anything about who I was or how I liked to spend my time. The conversation always spun into strangely boring directions, while I struggled to work out what a normal person might say on topics such as music, culture, and philosophical attitudes toward life. The problem was that I never wanted to know whether someone had siblings and pets, or how much they had disliked growing up in the suburbs. I wanted to know what they would do if they were a gladiator in the Colosseum, and the Colosseum was flooded, and they had to fight a shark.

When I had been preparing for college admissions interviews, my guidance counselor had told me it could be helpful to write down a list of traits that I wanted my interviewers to remember about me. We generated a list of those traits together; at least, I let her tell me what traits I should try to have. We decided that I should try to come off as curious, diligent, and responsible.

I never forgot that advice. I kept coming back to it during freshman orientation weekend, when I was trying to make a good impression on everyone I met. I wanted to give bookish, literary, and thoughtful, but it was hard to communicate all this through icebreakers. At the end of the fall semester, my roommate confessed to me that she thought I gave off cold and indifferent vibes.

That had horrified me. Indifferent! When I was frightened to death that no one liked me! I didn't want to give J.C this same impression, but I couldn't decide what qualities I wanted him to attach to me until I knew how I wanted him to treat me, and what I wanted this relationship to become, but this in turn depended on what kind of person I thought I was—that is, whether I was the kind of girl who would engage in a relationship, sexual or not, with J.C. I thought maybe this was what my English professor had meant when he kept talking about the hermeneutic circle. All this was going through my head while J.C was in the bathroom, doing things that involved the clinking of bottles and the rapid turning on and turning off of the sink.

My trait would be easy, I decided. Sweet, accommodating, and up for anything. If I could just get through the rest of this day without irritating J.C, I would count this a success.

“Okay.” J.C emerged from the bathroom. He was wearing an eye-watering quantity of body spray, and he had done something to his hair so that it was now sticking up in the front. “So. Do you want to try one of the public springs?” He pulled his swim trunks out of his bag. “I think we can sneak around the gender thing if there's not a lot of people around.”

I had not brought a swimsuit. The idea of a swimsuit had never even crossed my mind. “I don't know if that's a good idea.”

“It's off season; I really don't think anyone will care.”

“I just don't want to get in trouble.”

“Jeez, Anna's right.” I flinched. “You are obsessed with blending in.”

“I mean—I just want to respect the local customs.”

“Fine, then what do you want to do instead?”

I saw now I was in a terrible position. Distracted as I had been with Anna, I had not put any effort into planning this Beitou trip. I had assumed that when we showed up, the attractions would just materialize in front of us, the way they always had on any group excursion. Now we had no itinerary, and the one thing J.C had clearly wanted to do was off the table.

It was still early in the day. I had to spend at least eight hours with J.C before we could plausibly call it a night and go to sleep. The only thing I knew about Beitou was that it was famous for its hot springs. I had no idea what else the town had to offer.

“Maybe we could just walk around,” I said. “Like, explore the resort area, and then explore the town center. Let's just see where the road takes us?”

“Fine,” said J.C. “Okay. Fine.”

Outside, we followed the road signs up the hill to the Beitou Geothermal Valley.

We passed about a dozen hot springs resorts along the way. They all looked fancier than ours, and we both pretended not to notice. Everywhere I looked, there were street stands hawking hard-boiled eggs cooked over sulfurous gas. We passed a little family of German tourists who seemed very excited about these eggs, though I couldn't see how sulfurous gas could make anything taste better.

The Geothermal Valley lay behind an iron gate. At the front of the gate was a stone fountain, from which a thick stream of bright green water trickled steadily into a basin. A sign on the fountain explained the health benefits of this special sulfurous water: It could cure all sorts of ailments, including arthritis and cancer. I drew my fingers idly through the stream.

I couldn't believe this shade of green existed in nature. I was sure someone had dribbled in some food coloring. It was the bright green of theatrical effects, of magic potions. But I didn't have any ailments to cure. I was young and healthy and I had no wrinkles. Maybe if I had leprosy or something—then I'd be really excited about this water.

The path beyond promised us a hike through the Geothermal Valley and a better look at the sulfur mines, but the gate was locked. The park was closed today for maintenance.

J.C kicked at the gate. “Why on a Friday?”

His vehemence startled me; I shrank back. “It's okay.”

“But people come out on Fridays!” His cheeks were flushed red, and his voice carried a sudden, childish hitch. For a moment, I thought he might cry. “Why would you close it today, of all the fucking days?”

“It's really okay.” I tugged at his arm. “We'll just go back and look at the city, okay? We don't have to see the springs up close.”

“Fine.”

We walked a few paces together down the path. For a while, neither of us spoke. I was embarrassed about shrinking, and J.C was embarrassed about his tantrum, and we were both going mad from the heat. We had revealed too much about how circumstances made us feel, and now we had to kill ourselves.

Our mood improved as we turned back toward the town center. The old woman on the train had been right. Beitou in the summertime heat was punishing, and on the rocky paths near the Geothermal Valley, the sun conspired with the humidity to create a choking greenhouse atmosphere. But nearer the main street there were trails that led through a forest, and after several silent minutes in the shade, I no longer felt that life was not worth living.

J.C reached out and snaked his fingers around mine.

I had seen this coming. I had felt his hand knocking against mine for the last few minutes, like a boat attempting to dock, so I didn't flinch when at last he made contact. But now I couldn't enjoy my walk because I was so fixated on his hand.

It wasn't any sweatier than mine, and his grip wasn't uncomfortable. It was just so big. My fingers were lost inside all that flesh. And every time I moved, or tried to turn a corner, I had to be excruciatingly aware of his hand, which was of course connected to the rest of his body, and which constrained my every action.

But letting go was such a violent declaration. Commenting on it would be even worse. Then we would break whatever truce made this walk so pleasant.

Finally J.C pulled away to check the maps app on his phone, and I jammed my hands into my pockets.

Half a mile down the road we saw a wooden sign pointing toward a public spring. J.C wanted to check it out, so we followed the path until we came to a row of turnstiles. The man at the gate said that it would cost N.T$10 each for us to enter. He glanced at us and added, “And the men's and women's baths are separate.”

“We don't want to soak in the springs,” said J.C. “We just want to have a look around; can we do that?”

The old man asked him what he was looking for.

“Just looking.” J.C repeated the verb, as if that were the source of confusion. I was struck with a wave of déjà vu. This was the same verb Anna had used to justify peeking through my texts: 看. “Look, look.”

Finally the old man shrugged and let us pass through the turnstiles.

The public springs, too, looked nothing like the photos from the resorts. They just looked like public pools, except that steam curled lazily from the water's surface. Faded towels, foldout chairs, and plastic toys lay scattered around two circular tubs cut from stone: one for the men, one for the women.

In the men's pool, a half dozen old, muscled grandpas sat leaning against the rim with their elbows propped against the edge. They were wearing matching swim trunks: a navy-blue base with a pineapple print. In the women's pool, a cluster of fully dressed grandmas sat perched on the edge, nibbling sunflower seeds and soaking their feet.

I stifled a giggle. There was nothing erotic about this. It looked nice, actually. I wished I'd brought a swimsuit after all.

We stood awhile, until some of the old men started to gaze back, and J.C said, “Let's keep moving.”

Then emerged from the trees a sight that made this whole journey worth it: a three-story building of gleaming wood, all clean lines and bright lights, wooden banisters wrapping around floor-to-ceiling windows. A museum? An art gallery? We wandered closer.

It was the public library. I tried the doors, but they were locked. A sign on the window apologized that the library was closed for renovations.

“Damn it.” I pressed my forehead against the window glass. I could just imagine walking through those stacks: cool air, cool wood, and crisp, waiting books.

“Very Zen atmosphere,” said J.C. “It looks Japanese.”

As we turned back into town, I discovered that lots of things in Beitou looked Japanese: the teahouses, the Hot Spring Museum, and especially the old train station, which had once been called the Shin-hokuto Station and was now a museum. This made sense, since most of these buildings had been constructed during the Japanese colonial era. The Japanese had loved Beitou—they'd been delighted to find thermal springs so far from home.

I was starting to get a sense of what made a building design look distinctively Japanese: an elegant wooden frame, a sloped roof, and a certain meticulousness about the rocks and foliage in the landscaping. Japanese architecture struck me as intensely deliberate, as if someone had sought divine permission before placing each stone in the foundation. It was less clear to me how to define classical Chinese architecture, except that it seemed gaudier and always involved a lot of red.

I still hadn't figured out the general Taiwanese attitude toward Japan. It did seem quite different from the general mainlander attitude toward Japan, where no amount of time could erase the hatred of the Japanese. I had grown up watching war dramas with my father. These dramas were thirty or forty episodes long, and they arrived in our mailbox in plastic-wrapped box sets. They were all about wholesome country girls who fell in love with wholesome country boys until the Japanese came and raped the country girls and massacred their families, and then the country boys went down in a heroic spray of bullets. My father was from a village formerly occupied by the Japanese, and every time we returned he made us look at the bullet holes they'd left in the walls of his old home. He could quote exactly one line from Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, and it was “I despise the goddamn Japs!”

My parents were not unique in this. My friend Elaine was from Nanjing and her boyfriend, Ethan, was from South Korea, and because of various Japanese war crimes in Nanjing and South Korea, neither of their parents had permitted them to visit Japan growing up. Over spring break Elaine told her parents she and Ethan were joining a group trip to Tokyo, and her father had shaken his head, sighed, and said, “I suppose your generation is different.”

However, as Teacher Sun had explained it, Taiwan's colonial experience under Japan was much better than South Korea's or mainland China's. According to her, the Japanese had trod more lightly and brought modernization and education to the Taiwanese. Many older Taiwanese people had learned Japanese as their first written language and still found it easier to read Japanese than Mandarin. Compared to the chaos and brutal repression of martial rule under the Nationalists, they remembered the era of Japanese occupation as one of relative peace, prosperity, law, and order.

This seemed like a reductive way of understanding things, but the cultural evidence was apparent. I saw the ghosts of Japan everywhere, from the spare architectural lines to the omakase restaurants to the ubiquitous Japanese translations to the casual linguistic remnants I heard on the street. Sumimasen. Ojiisan, obaasan. And I had noticed that at shops, when clerks handed change back, the polite thing was to receive it with both hands and give a little bow.

So what defined this relationship? Nostalgia? Resentment?

I had no framework for making sense of this. In all my history classes, we were taught that colonialism was bad and self-determination was good. The Japanese had once colonized Taiwan, so surely this meant that the Japanese were bad. But Taiwan hadn't achieved self-determination when the Japanese left. There was no decolonial transition here.

Instead, a defeated regime came over from the mainland and put the whole island under martial rule, and now the Taiwanese were trapped between the regime that had once put them under martial rule, an authoritarian regime that wanted to absorb them into the mainland, and an imperialist regime pulling strings from across the Pacific. Not once in modern history had Taiwan been allowed to determine its own future. Taiwan had only ever been passed from occupier to occupier—indeed, to Taiwan's indigenous peoples, the Han Chinese themselves were occupiers. So who was I to say any occupier was better than the last?

Beitou, alas, was simply not that big. We ate dinner at a ramen shack and then walked around a bit more, but it was clear that we had seen all there was to see. I consulted the internet, which informed me there was a restaurant on top of a tower on top of a waste incinerator. I suggested this to J.C, but he said he wasn't hungry anymore, and it seemed a long way to walk just to see an incinerator. After we'd looped twice around the same fried dough stand, J.C suggested we head back to the hotel. When we got up to our room, he announced, “I think we should take that bath now.”

I followed him across the room. We regarded the hot tub. This, too, was smaller than we'd hoped.

The promotion had made it seem like every room had its own private swimming pool. This tub was just a bit bigger than a typical bathtub, except that it was cut in a rectangle shape into the floor with a step inside where you could sit.

J.C reached for the taps. “Does hot water bother you?”

What did this mean? “Does hot water bother anyone?”

“I mean, how hot?” asked J.C. “Some people don't like it super hot. They're really sensitive about hot water.”

I wondered how many girls J.C had taken baths with, and whether those girls were sensitive about hot water.

“I think whatever you like will be fine with me,” I said.

“Okay.”

He turned on the taps. We sat on the edge of the tub, waiting while the water pooled around our ankles. J.C stripped off his clothes.

He did this so casually that it didn't seem like that big a deal, and so I stripped off my clothes too. I was still clinging to the hope that this experience didn't have to be sexual. Maybe in other countries, boys and girls took baths naked with each other all the time.

“I'm cold,” said J.C. “Let's get in.”

The water came up just over our butts. The tub wasn't so large that we could spread out our limbs. We sat facing each other, our knees drawn up to our chests. I felt like a toddler. I flapped my hands like they were fins, and J.C winced as water splashed across his face.

“This is fun,” he said.

Obviously, the point of this bath was not to get clean. But if we were not to get clean, then what were we taking a bath for? I hadn't taken a bath since I was a small child—showers seemed so much more hygienic, and anyway I could never stand bathing in that tub clotted with my sisters' hairs.

I had never been to a public bath, and I wasn't sure what to do in this one. Was there a distinct pleasure to be found from steeping in the water? How long would we have to sit? When would we know if it had worked?

Maybe if I could have a deep and meaningful experience with the water, then this sexual business would go away. But the water didn't seem anything special. It came out of the taps perfectly clear, not jade-green, like the water at the Geothermal Valley. It didn't smell magical at all. If anything, it smelled faintly of rotten eggs. That must have been the sulfur, and I supposed that was proof this water really was from the springs, but I still doubted that sulfur had healing qualities, and even if it did, I didn't have any diseases that sulfur could clear. I tried splashing the water across my cheeks. Possibly it would do something for my acne.

“Hey,” said J.C.

He was now leaning against the far back wall of the tub, his elbows propped against the edges. His eyes flickered down to his crotch. I followed his gaze and saw to my dismay that he had an erection.

He scooted toward me. “I really like you, you know.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I'm really glad we got to know each other. I'm glad you're here this summer.”

“Me too.”

“I think you're a really special person.”

“Oh! Well, thanks.”

He lowered his chin. His gaze had become very intense. The intensity came from his eyebrows, the arch of them. I wondered if this was something he had control over—whether he practiced it in the mirror before he tried it out in public.

I ran through a mental catalog of J.C's features, trying to decide how I felt about this situation. Yes, J.C was very beautiful, but when I looked at him, I could not feel any stir of desire in my loins. In fact, I had never felt the stir of desire in my loins for any flesh-and-blood boy. I understood lust as an abstract concept, something I felt toward fictional characters, and though I wanted desperately to feel it around a real person in the moment, this had never happened. At this point, I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with me, and I was truly disappointed that J.C was not the one.

But there was no good way out of the situation, and it seemed that the old mantra applied. The only way out was through.

J.C pushed his fingers through his hair. “Look how hard I am.”

I suppressed a snort.

I had learned over the past year that boys were not subtle about getting me to handle their penises. Sometimes they grabbed my hand and placed it down there. Sometimes they just rolled over onto my thigh and started rubbing themselves until I took over. Sometimes they said things like look how hard I am, touch it, feel it. The general strategy seemed to be shoving the penis at other people and hoping for the best, and this did not reflect well on me or my fellow women, but most of the time it worked.

“So hard,” I said.

“I bet you can make it even harder.”

I splashed some water across my arms, which felt like the equivalent of rolling up my sleeves. My freshman year had been very instructive. I knew how to handle a penis.

Thoughts of milking a cow rose unbidden to my mind, but once the image was there I couldn't get rid of it. Yes, this was what I would have to do—milk him dry, and then I could go to sleep. I didn't want to be in the hot water anymore. It was making me dizzy. He didn't try to kiss me, which was a relief. I didn't like kissing people if they hadn't brushed their teeth after a meal, and I knew J.C had not. I was not ready to taste pork ramen on his tongue—that would have been the final straw.

“Ow,” said J.C.

“Sorry.”

“I think it's the water. The friction—I mean, you have to lubricate it.”

“Oh, okay. Did you bring lube?”

“No, I meant with your spit. Like with your mouth.”

Water gurgled around us. The water level had reached the jets along the wall, and the way they sputtered sounded so much like wet farts that I couldn't help but giggle.

“What was that?” J.C asked.

“Chinese text,” I said. We had learned this phrase in Thought and Society last week. “The joy of fish in the water.” I splashed with my elbows, pretending my arms were fins, but J.C didn't look amused. “It means sex, isn't that funny?

“Okay, so.” J.C settled back against the wall. “Do you want to try lubricating it?”

He clearly wanted me to put his penis in my mouth, but I didn't want to do that, so I licked my hand and went at his shaft again. J.C's eyelids fluttered closed. I could see the whites of his eyes.

It seemed like we were getting some good traction here. Every time I moved my wrist, he gave a little twitch, which I assumed was from mounting pleasure. I asked him to warn me before he came. I didn't want to pollute the water.

“Not quite there yet.” His eyes remained closed. His brows furrowed, and his lips twitched down in a frown of concentration.

I redoubled my efforts. It seemed to be taking much longer than it should. My understanding of the penis was that you did not have to contribute much to get it excited. But something was wrong. The penis was getting softer rather than harder, and this meant there was no end in sight.

“Maybe if you put it in your mouth,” said J.C.

“But we just had ramen.”

He blinked at me. “Huh?”

“I'm really full,” I explained. “So I think that would make me nauseous. I don't like, um, giving blow jobs this soon after eating.”

“How much longer would you need?”

“Maybe like a few hours. Until I've digested everything.”

“I see.”

I kept going with my hand. I felt a creep of panic; how much longer would this take? This had always been the conundrum. I was always getting into situations that I was supposed to enjoy but didn't, and it felt like more of a disruption, even a violation, to force things to a halt instead of sticking it out; keeping a stiff upper lip through all that wet bumping and grinding.

I realized this wasn't very feminist of me, but the truth was that between the inconvenience of bearing it and the social horror of admitting I wanted to stop, I always chose the lesser agony. I felt a flare of resentment for J.C then, something approaching hatred, but I couldn't very well blame him for failing to read my mind.

J.C's eyes flickered open and closed. I couldn't read his expression. Sometimes he seemed ecstatic, and I hoped I was nearly there, that I had flipped whatever switch made orgasm inevitable.

But then his lips pulled back in a grimace, and I lightened the pressure in case he was chafing. I tried my best, but it was undeniable: J.C was only getting softer, and my attempts to work him back up kept making him hiss between his teeth.

“Sorry,” he said at last. “I don't think this is happening.”

We sat there a moment in the tub. J.C turned off the taps. Then he glanced at me, eyebrows slightly raised, like he was asking whether he should return the favor.

“Oh, no,” I nearly said. But I didn't want to hurt his feelings. I pretended to think it over, and then I sighed. “Honestly, I'm kind of tired.”

“You're sure?”

“Very.”

“Okay.”

He didn't even try to hide his relief. We clambered out, a movement that I could not make dignified no matter how hard I tried. Toweling off was bliss. The cool air on my limbs. My vision dimmed, then pulsed back. I flopped stomach-down on the bed and just breethd for a while, relishing the soft, dry sheets beneath me.

“I'm going to use the bathroom,” said J.C.

“Okay, sure.”

He locked the door and didn't come out for a long time.

Breakfast was included in our booking, so we stopped by the hotel restaurant the next morning before we left.

The buffet spread was enormous, and somewhat baffling given I still hadn't seen any evidence that J.C and I were not the only guests. There were rows upon rows of silver buffet chafers bearing red bean buns, sesame buns, egg tarts, shrimp shumai, sautéed prawns in clamshells. No one stopped me, so I put one of everything on my plate. I had always wanted to do this: eat just one bite of everything, just because I could.

“Wow,” said J.C. “You're really hungry.”

“It's free,” I said.

But somehow everything tasted the same. The red bean buns were just as generically sweet as the egg tarts. Even the prawns in clamshells tasted no different from the stir-fried egg noodles.

I understood how hotel buffets worked now. It was all the same ingredients, presented in different shapes: Everything savory was just sesame oil and soy sauce, and everything sweet was flour, eggs, and sugar.

After breakfast we headed back to the station. It was Saturday, and we had no classes to get to, but neither of us suggested staying in Beitou through the day, even though the Geothermal Valley would now be open. We didn't speak much on the train. I kept glancing sideways at J.C, trying to read his mood.

I was afraid he was angry with me, though I couldn't imagine what he could be angry about. Perhaps my failure to make him come? But at least I had put in some effort.

I had worked his penis for at least twenty minutes; did that not count for something? Anyhow, I had more right to be angry. He had been a most ungenerous lover. He hadn't even gestured toward my clitoris. But I was just glad to be on my way home.

Was J.C tired, or was he sulking? I wanted to break the silence, but I couldn't think of anything to say that didn't seem anxious or desperate. I told myself not to overthink things. We had had a fun cultural experience and now we were relaxing on our journey back home. Nothing between us had changed. If anything, our friendship had clarified, and now we could go back to how we were without the lingering threat of sex. It could be that simple.

J.C got off one stop before me; he had, he claimed, some errands to run in Ximen.

“Okay,” I said. “See you Monday.”

“Yeah,” he said, and slipped off the train.

Anna wasn't at the apartment. I reread the last text she had sent me: okay—have fun?

The question mark was clearly passive-aggressive. I hadn't texted her anything since, and now I felt guilty.

Hi, just got back.

She did not respond. A few hours later I tried again: I'm around if you want to get some lunch? Or dinner later?

Still she did not respond, and I began to worry something had happened to her. I checked her Instagram and saw that she had been online a few minutes ago. So she was alive; she just didn't want to talk to me.

I didn't know what to do with myself. I had bracketed this whole weekend for Beitou, and now I had no plans. I didn't know what any of my classmates were up to, and I was too embarrassed to reach out and ask.

I decided I might as well get ahead on my coursework, so I packed up my textbooks and embarked on a circuit through all the cafés in the neighborhood, leaving every time I finished a drink. First Youmoutoohana. Then Sounds Good Café. I walked a full mile to a new cat-themed coffee bar in the next neighborhood over, but there were no cats that day as they were all getting their monthly grooming, and without the cats the coffee was not worth the expense. Time passed very slowly. I was jarred by the shift from the frantic activity of the week, when every hour was taken up with coursework or meals or commuting, to such a silent, creeping afternoon. I did not want to bother Anna again, and I certainly couldn't text J.C. I tried to focus on my flash cards, but my brain refused to register any of the characters before me. I found myself automatically hitting the green button over and over, regardless of whether I knew the word or not.

When I left the cat coffee bar it was five in the afternoon, and I felt a wave of vertigo when I stepped out onto the street. My vision went fuzzy. My heart was beating very quickly.

I realized the problem—I had drunk gallons of caffeine all day without eating anything since breakfast. Sweating, I hurried home and lay facedown on the couch.

I remained there for several hours. I kept touching the screen of my phone, hoping for any communication from J.C or Anna, but there was nothing. It occurred to me that I should eat something, or drink some water, but the effort required to do these things seemed insurmountable.

I made some desultory attempts to return to my textbooks, but it was hopeless. I couldn't focus through this fog. I felt I was waiting for something bad to happen, and until it did, I could not continue with my life.

I'd given up on the day and gone to bed early by the time Anna came home.

I rolled over and sat up. “Hey.”

“Oh, hey.” She didn't turn the light on. “Sorry I woke you up.”

“It's okay, I wasn't really asleep.”

“Did you have a nice time in Beitou?”

“Yeah, it was all right. I'm sorry you couldn't make it.”

“Yeah, well.” Anna set her bag down and started taking things out of it, one by one. Water bottle, then textbooks, then umbrella. “I wouldn't have made it until late in the day, and then it wouldn't have been worth it.”

“No, you should have come. I wish you were there. It was—I don't know. The vibe was kind of off with J.C.”

“Was it,” said Anna.

I thought about how much to tell her. Maybe later. She looked tired. I needed to frame things so that she wouldn't think that I had wanted to sleep with J.C behind her back, or that she had been deliberately excluded because we didn't want a third wheel.

The problem was that all these things were true, at least partially, and I had to figure out what I thought about it all before I broached the subject with her. “I get the sense it was kind of off season. So a lot of the good stuff was closed.”

“I see,” said Anna. “Then I guess I didn't miss anything.”

“No, you really didn't.”

We were both speaking in a bizarre, gentle tone, like we were tending to babies. We had to maintain the veneer of the dark, the friendly quiet. I couldn't stand it.

“Do you want to go ride the Maokong Gondola tomorrow?” I asked. “It looks like it's only raining in the morning, so we could go after lunch. And then maybe we can check out the zoo, if it's not too hot?”

Anna was silent for a moment. “I'm really behind on my homework, to be honest.”

“Oh, okay.”

“But maybe we can do that on a different weekend.”

“Yeah, whatever you like.”

I pulled the covers up over my shoulders. Anna sat awhile in the dark, clicking through her phone. Then she stepped into the bathroom and closed the door.

Anna left early the next morning.

“Impromptu trip,” she told me as she zipped up her bag. I didn't fully understand what was going on. I was half asleep, and somehow she was already showered and fully dressed. I gathered she was going on a hike with Skipper and Belinda. I didn't ask whether I could go, or why she hadn't told me sooner. It was clearly punishment for leaving her behind for Beitou.

I couldn't sleep after that. I lay in bed, scrolling mindlessly through my phone. Anna and I had spent the spring semester reading through Taiwan travel blogs, making a shared bucket list for our weekends.

- Underground jazz club

- Hualien day trip

- Kaohsiung/Tainan?

- Maokong Gondola—zoo after-pandas!!!

We'd been so excited about those pandas. We hadn't shut up about them all semester. It was as if the pandas were some religious icon, and once we glimpsed the pandas, then our pilgrimage would be complete.

I'm sorry about yesterday, I texted Anna. Beitou really was a bummer. I hope you're having a nice time.

She didn't respond.

I spent a while staring at the ceiling, going over the events of that morning, trying to determine how guilty I should feel. Slowly my regret morphed into irritation. So what if we had left Anna behind? J.C had not wanted her there, or he would have called her.

That wasn't my fault. Couldn't she see that? Couldn't she read between the lines?

Still, it was a shitty thing to do, and I had done it. I had done it just so that the thing Anna wanted would not happen. It was like I had snatched an ice cream cone from her hands, only to throw it on the floor.

But friendships could survive a thing like this. I only had to give her time. There would be a reckoning, of course. Anna would call me some mean things, and I would apologize many times, and then we could go back to the way we were. She couldn't stay angry at me for long.

We were roommates, after all. We still had six weeks to go.

Meanwhile, I had to get through this Sunday. I told myself that this was a gift: the first full day I'd had all to myself since I got here. Hadn't I been nervous, when we arrived, that this apartment might feel too cramped? But I'd grown used to the sound of Anna breathing, flipping pages just around the corner. I thought about reaching out to other people in our program, but that seemed so desperate. They would know I had been abandoned.

I fiddled with my phone, scrolling through old conversations. None of my friends from home were awake yet, and besides, those threads had died down over the break. I hadn't heard from Flora or my parents in weeks. I considered calling home, but studying abroad had been such a reprieve from my family; I didn't want to get dragged back in.

I had once read in an advice column that truly charismatic people knew how to be alone, and the truly productive knew how to be bored. So if I wanted to be charismatic and productive, then I should figure out how to spend Sunday by myself. The possibilities were endless. I could watch anything, cue up any of the three-hour Taiwan New Cinema films that Teacher Lin kept insisting we watch. I could go treat myself to a nice meal, like the omakase at the sushi stand down the street. I could even masturbate, which I had not done since the end of last term, because I hadn't once had a bedroom to myself. I tried this, but J.C's face floated before my eyes, and then I wasn't in the mood.

So many hours ahead, but I couldn't commit to anything. Nothing felt urgent enough to start. I made some attempt at studying, but no matter how hard I threw my mind at the page, the connections between symbol and meaning failed to form. Characters slid in and out of focus. I labored through sentences and forgot how they'd started before I reached the end.

Late in the afternoon, I realized that I hadn't spoken a single word out loud all day.

“Huh,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me, tinny and foreign. “Alone,” I said, in English. Then again. “Alone, alone, alone.” The syllables rolled off my tongue, the sound of an eternal afternoon sun.

I missed Anna again on Monday. I slept late, and she got up early, and by the time I was up for my shower she had already left for class.

So the situation was worse than I had thought. I was familiar with this sort of silence, the heaviness of the air before thunder. I had felt this thickness often throughout my childhood. I could never pinpoint the interaction that alerted me—maybe the tone in which Jasmine uttered something at the dinner table, maybe the way my father's face tightened in response—but I always knew, and Flora always knew, and we just tiptoed around, giggling nervously, until one of them started to scream, and then someone was smashing all the dishes in the kitchen, one by one by one.

Class dragged that day. It wasn't just me. Everyone seemed clobbered by the weekend. It was inordinately hot, the peak of a heat wave, and we slumped listless by the open windows, batting away the flies.

In Thought and Society, we spent nearly the whole hour hung up on a single phrase: Chinese text. The character 乖, pronounced guai, meant “good, obedient.” I knew this because Flora's childhood nickname was Guai-Guai, and we never stopped making fun of her for it. Jasmine and I were named An-An and Li-Li, literally “comfort-comfort” and “pretty-pretty,” while poor Flora was named “obedient-obedient.” But paired with the character Chinese text suddenly meant “contrary,” or “perverse.” It never meant those things in any other context. Why now?

“It happens sometimes.” Teacher Cai wrote another character on the board. 去, qù, “to go.” “This used to mean something different in Classical Chinese. If you 去 a place, that means you're leaving a place. Now when you 去 somewhere, it means you're going to somewhere.” She stepped back, frowning at the board. “Hm. Chinese is more confusing than people realize.”

“But how can the meaning flip like that?” I asked. I couldn't think of any English words that did this. It seemed a basic requirement of any functional language that it could distinguish opposite meanings from one another.

“Well,” said Teacher Sun, “in a sense, all meanings contain their own opposite. We gather when this happens from context.”

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. It seemed Chinese would always be impenetrable to me. I could commit thousands of characters to memory, but still their meanings could flip on me at any time.

J.C wasn't waiting for me in the lobby at lunchtime. I had expected this, but still it stung. I hung around for a few moments, just in case, and then I crossed the street to the Starbucks. I didn't want a real lunch, I just wanted to sit somewhere with air-conditioning. I ordered something called a “chocolate marshmallow scone,” but it didn't resemble anything like a scone. It tasted like dirt.

In Modern Chinese Literature, we were reading a story called “The Tribe of Generals” by Chen Yingzhen. The story was about an old man and a young girl who both belong to a roving music band. The old man is possibly attracted to and definitely spying on the young girl while she sleeps. The young girl was sold off into sexual servitude by her family and ran away but is going back to her family, because otherwise they will have to sell off her younger sister to cover their debt.

The old man gifts her his retirement savings so that she can pay off the debt, but this means he has to keep playing with the roving music band. Years later, they reunite. The young girl still became a prostitute, but at this point has managed to buy her way out.

The old man is older, and just as lonely as before. They don't have sex. They kill themselves by the roadside.

Teacher Lin told us that the story was a metaphor for the relationship between China and Taiwan. The old man was China: too sick, poor, and ugly to do anything to help the young girl, who represented Taiwan: sold out to and mistreated by various partners. (We had a running joke that all the stories we read in class were about one of three things: (1) the trauma of the Chinese Civil War; (2) the trauma of martial law under the Nationalists, or (3) the trauma of modernization.) Teacher Lin asked us if we agreed with this interpretation.

I didn't know how I could possibly comment on this. Shuya and Meijuan didn't seem to know either, so the silence kept dragging out between us.

By now we had learned that you could take two attitudes into class. You could lean in and try to follow every word of the conversation like a rapt squirrel, racking your brains for any new vocabulary that applied. Or you could be passive. You could respond to questions when asked but otherwise give nothing.

Everyone had days when they gave nothing, but the trouble was that we had all decided to give nothing at the same time. We were five weeks into the program and tired of thinking in Chinese. Meijuan had visibly lost weight. Shuya still had no air-conditioning at his apartment and therefore was always suffering something close to heatstroke.

Normally when we didn't have much to contribute, we asked Teacher Lin to explain various aspects of Taiwanese culture to us. But we had already spent the previous week interrogating her about roving music bands, child prostitution, rural poverty, and the trauma of the Chinese Civil War. Now there was nothing more to say. We had recently learned the chengyu Chinese text: to throw bricks and retrieve jade, which meant to offer a modest remark in hope of eliciting wisdom from others. But today Teacher Lin was throwing jade in desperation, and we wouldn't even give her bricks.

“So,” she said at last. “Do you have any questions about the vocabulary words in this story?”

We all shook our heads.

“Are there any parts of the story you want especially to discuss?”

A disinterested shuffle of pages. I kept my eyes down, pretending I was checking the definition of some phrase in the text. I felt bad for Teacher Lin, but not bad enough to try.

In my one-on-one class, we were correcting my essay for that week's presentation.

“Overall, this is not a bad effort.” Teacher Sun pulled up my marked-up essay on the screen. It was a wall of red.

I had tried so hard on this one. I had double-checked every phrase in my dictionary app and had made sure to pattern every grammar configuration after a parallel sentence in the textbook. Where had all these errors come from?

My despair grew as Teacher Sun took me through everything that marked the difference between my writing style and a native speaker's style. I would never have clocked these mistakes. I had no idea these were things you shouldn't do. I had placed a causative clause after the explanation.

I kept using a certain introductory phrase where I should have used a different one. Sometimes what I'd written was grammatically correct, but a native speaker would have employed a slightly different word order. Why? There was no why. There were no rules. There was a certain rhythm that came naturally to native speakers, but I didn't have the ear for it. All I could do was try to internalize some general guidelines.

I had to compose in parallelisms, I had to use four-character strings instead of three, and I had to insert random characters for emphasis (whose meanings I could never keep straight), except for when it was inappropriate to do so, but I couldn't know when that was.

I thought about the many English essays I had been forced to edit by the Chinese parents' mafia network over the past year. In December of my senior year of high school, word got around in my father's village that I had been accepted to Yale, Yélǔ, and then everyone was asking my father if I would look over their child's work. Every few weeks my dad would text me something like, Hey, Qiuqiu's mother wants some help.

Are you available? And if I said I wasn't available, he would remind me that Qiuqiu's mother had once brought eight-treasure soup to my mother when she was in labor with my sister, and so we really owed her one.

Once I was asked to edit my cousin's application essay to a summer program in New York. My cousin styled herself Vicky in English, though she had never been outside China; she had chosen the name because of the film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The moment I opened Vicky's essay I understood I was not being asked to do some light editing but rather to rewrite Vicky's essay from scratch. Her writing was incomprehensible. She used rules of capitalization, punctuation, and spacing completely at random. I didn't understand how Vicky had messed these last two up, because Chinese also had rules about punctuation and spacing, and they weren't all that different from the English rules. I had a sneaking suspicion that Vicky had half-assed her essay because she knew that I was going to rewrite it for her, and this made me feel exploited. I called my father to complain. “Vicky clearly can't speak English.”

“Of course she can,” he said. “She's been learning it every day in high school.”

“Well, then she's clearly not paying attention, because this is gibberish.”

“Be nice, Lily.”

“I wouldn't feel responsible sending this in.” I tried to pretend I was acting in Vicky's best interest, but I was just being mean. “She's not prepared for a whole summer in New York. She's going to struggle.”

My father gave me a lecture about supporting our extended family and how Chinese immigrants had only ever gotten ahead because they looked out for their own, and finally I agreed to do my best to clean it up. I determined to put in as little effort as Vicky had. I took out all the obvious mistakes, but I made no effort to replace her half-thoughts with substantive ones, or to reorganize the logical flow of her statements. The essay had no thesis; it read like experimental poetry. I have always dreamed of improving my English, among Americans. New York is a magical city—Friends. In the end Vicky never came to New York that summer, and everyone intimated that this was my fault.

But in Chinese, it turned out, I was just as bad as Vicky. This terrified me: the possibility that no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn't even understand what I had done wrong.

All day long, I had felt that something was off at the department.

It wasn't just the heat wave. I was sure people were looking at me, but I couldn't catch anyone in the act. The back of my neck kept prickling.

I saw Margrit and Paolo whispering at the lockers, but when I entered the student lounge, they stopped talking. It was nothing I could put my finger on, but there were too many signs. I couldn't be imagining them all.

The last time I had felt like this was in the fall of my freshman year. My period came while I was at the gym, and I thought some eyes were lingering on me, but it wasn't until I got home that I saw the red stain that had spread all over my butt cheeks and crotch.

In the bathroom after class, a girl I hardly knew came out of the stall, glanced sideways at me, and seemed to stare a second longer than normal. After she left, I checked my appearance in the mirror. No crotch stains. No toilet paper stuck to my shoes. I stretched my mouth wide open to check my teeth, but I saw nothing there.

I ran into Anna at the apartment, just as she was stepping out with her backpack. We crossed paths on the staircase. She flinched when she saw me, as if I'd jumped out at her from behind a corner. “Oh, hi.”

“Hey,” I said. “Are you going out to study?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” I knew better than to ask if I could join her. “So I'll see you later.”

“Yeah, okay.” She stepped past me, paused, and then turned. “Hey, you know people are talking about you.”

My eyes prickled. I clenched my jaw; I didn't want her to see me cry. “Okay?”

“So you do know.” She shrugged. “Okay, so.”

“Am I supposed to care?”

“I mean. I guess I would want to know if people were saying I gave J.C a blow job in a hot tub.”

I had known this was coming. Deep down I had suspected it all day, but still hearing it out loud felt like a hammer against my chest. “What?”

“Everyone's talking about it. Like, they wouldn't shut up about it in the lounge.”

“But we—but I didn't do that. The blow job, I mean.”

Anna looked me up and down. Her face churned through several expressions, as if she was trying to decide whether or not to feel sorry for me. “Okay?”

“I really didn't.”

“Look, I don't really care what you and J.C got up to.” She shrugged her backpack higher on her shoulders and moved toward the door. “But—yeah, that's what they're saying. Just so you know.”

The next day, at lunchtime, I waited at the bottom of the stairs for J.C. He flinched when he saw me, the same way Anna had. What were they so afraid of?

“Can I talk to you?”

“Okay.” He waited, hands in his pockets.

“Downstairs,” I said. “I think we'd better use English.”

“Um, okay.”

We walked outside the building, just under the awning where we could stand in the shade. We didn't move to cross the street. I didn't know whether we were stalling because of me or J.C. But we obviously weren't walking to lunch together.

J.C stretched his arms over his head. “So what's up?”

This irked me. He knew what this was about—he was making me spell it out.

“So there's this weird rumor going around.”

“Yeah?”

“About what people think happened in Beitou.” I folded my arms against my chest. “Sexually?”

“Ah,” he said.

“And I know I wasn't going around telling people about it.”

“Ah,” J.C said again. “I mean.”

The doors to the lobby kept opening, and our classmates kept walking by. The lunchtime rush had begun. Several people glanced our way. We stepped toward a shaded corner and lowered our voices. “And people have been staring at me all day, and I think the whole program knows, so you see why I might be upset.”

J.C hemmed and hawed for a bit, tapping his fingers against his elbows. At last he said, “Look. I didn't tell people what we did, exactly—”

“So it just came from nowhere? This highly specific detail about a blow job in the hotel bath?”

J.C reddened. “So maybe I told a few people. Just Skipper, honestly. But it's not my fault if Skipper's gone and spread it around—”

“But what about me?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think it does to me to be the girl who gave you a blow job in a hot tub?” My voice hitched. “I mean, this is a pretty small program, so what consequences does that create for me socially, do you think?”

He looked surprised at this—genuinely, innocently surprised. “Well, that's kind of regressive.”

“What?”

“I mean, honestly, that's classic slut-shaming? We're adults, who cares what we did?”

Was I losing my mind? How had this become my fault? “But I didn't even blow you!”

“Well, it was a close thing.”

“Oh my God—”

“Listen, Lily.” J.C had his hands up in the most condescending gesture—as if I were a raging bull, and I had to be tamed. Whoa, Nelly. “I think the vibes aren't—I mean, between you and me, they're just not there. Anyways, I'm not looking for a committed relationship this summer. I hope you're not too disappointed.”

“I don't want to be in a committed relationship with you!”

“Okay, so what are we fighting about, then?”

The way he said this—the way he drawled out the okay, the way he actually backed away, as if I were about to charge—felt worse than a slap.

Some part of me still thought we had ended on good terms—that our Beitou adventure, awkward as it was, would have become a funny story between friends. Now I saw there was a certain generosity of friendship that simply was not there, and perhaps never had been. J.C did not actually like me. He did not care about me at all; in this moment, I was just a problem he wished would go away.

“Never mind.” I wasn't even angry anymore; I just didn't want to be around him. “I just—fine, it's fine.”

“Lily, don't be like that.” Again, he did that thing with his hands. “Come on—”

“Please leave me alone.”

I hurried up the stairs. J.C didn't follow me, or even so much as call my name.

I spent the lunch break in the library, trying to force myself to read. I didn't care about J.C or Anna or anything anyone had said about me. From now on, I would live like a monk: I would devote my life to study and quiet contemplation. I flipped open to a random chapter in my Modern Chinese Literature book, and as I worked through the characters, my pulse slowed, and my ears stopped buzzing. Studying had always worked to calm me down. I liked the rhythmic dependency, the continual motion, the stable referents. There was a right and a wrong and no confusion in the middle, and if I was studying, then I was being virtuous, and no one could yell at me. I had learned this trick a long time ago, disappearing into the page.

It helped that reading in Chinese demanded intense concentration. Sometimes—very rarely—I would get into a flow and lose myself in the plot. But more often I had to go word by word, pausing every so often to look something up in the dictionary.

But that took so long that often I forgot how the sentence began, or what to do with the multiple glosses of pivotal words. Complex clauses were hopeless. I always had to retrace my steps just to see how we had started on a sentence about a woman's relationship to her mother and ended on a metaphor about geese flying south.

It was like looking at a Chuck Close painting and being able to see only one little square at a time. The point always hovered just a bit beyond my grasp.

“Lily-tóngxué!”

It was Andrew, one of the older students in the program. Tóngxué, Chinese text, meant “classmate.” Addressing your peers as such was a distinctly midcentury thing to do. It evoked the martial discipline of a traditional Chinese classroom. No one said tóngxué except for a few white students who were inordinately obsessed with Chinese culture, and Andrew was one.

I didn't know Andrew well. We had only spoken several times in the lounge. I had gathered that he was a graduate student, he had been in Taipei for over a year, and he was writing a dissertation about folk operas in some rural village I'd never heard of. But he was being nice to me, and so in that moment, he was my best friend in the world.

“I'm here to spread the word,” said Andrew. His accent impressed me. If I closed my eyes, I might not have clocked that he was white. “Happy hour tonight. You should come through.”

“Tonight?”

It was only Tuesday. After a year of college, I'd still held on to my Puritan conviction that weeknight drinking was for deviants.

“It's half off for students on Tuesdays,” said Andrew. “Everyone's going.”

I blinked at my textbook. Those pages were so safe. But I'd already fallen out of the sentence; it would take forever to work my way back in. “I'm worried I'll fall behind.”

“Chinese text,” said Andrew. This chengyu had become one of the most common sayings around the department. If there is wine today, then get drunk today. Colloquially: yolo. “I'll email you the details. Think about it!”

I agonized for a while at the apartment and then decided to go to happy hour after all. It seemed foolish to turn down any kindness at this moment. I had to make some new friends. I wouldn't survive this next month otherwise.

It turned out that just about everyone in the program had been invited to this bar. Anna was standing in a corner with Skipper, Belinda, Margrit, and J.C. Some of them glanced briefly at me when I walked in, and I knew they had just been speaking about me, because they were trying very hard to pretend like they hadn't.

My first instinct was to turn around and leave. But this would make things worse—it would confirm I had something to be embarrassed about. Instead, I walked straight toward the bar.

I kept passing people who looked familiar, who returned my gaze in a vague and friendly way, but I didn't know their names. I realized my social circle within the program was actually so small. This made sense: I saw only the people who had the same classes at the exact same times as I did. But there were nearly two hundred students in the program, and not all of them could be friends with Anna or J.C. This encouraged me. If I didn't like the network I was in, then I could just find another one.

“Lily-tóngxué!” Someone jostled my shoulder. I turned; it was Andrew. “You made it!”

“I don't know what I want to drink.” I was trying to decide between a lychee martini and a passion fruit spritz, both of which sounded like they'd be tastier without the alcohol.

“Can I advise?”

“Um, sure.”

He pulled the drinks menu from my hands. “Don't bother with the cocktails. Do you like whisky?”

I tried to remember if I did. Fireball was the only whisky I knew about, and the last time I'd had Fireball, I'd been at a Thanksgiving dorm party drinking what people were calling “apple pie” shots.

“I like it fine?”

I could see Anna and J.C out of the corner of my eye. It seemed like they were arguing about something. J.C was talking, his head lowered toward Anna's ear. Both of them stared forward, but they didn't want anyone to know they were arguing. Anna's eyes darted in my direction, and I blinked away. I wanted her to see that I had my own friends, that I was having fun, so I angled my body toward Andrew like he was the most interesting person I had ever met.

He was talking about Taiwan's local whisky industry. “It's very impressive what they've managed to do in a few short years,” he said. “They don't have the institutional knowledge of the Scottish Highlands, right, but they've already become a huge market for single-malt whisky, and the whisky matures much faster here because of the tropical climate, without losing any complexity—”

The bartender asked, in English, if we knew what we wanted.

“Kavalan Classic.” Andrew said the “Kavalan” part in Chinese, but the “Classic” in English.

“On the rocks?”

“Neat for me.”

The bartender turned to me. “Same for you?”

I hesitated. What rocks did he mean?

“You have to drink it neat,” said Andrew. “You can add some drops of water if you want, to open up the flavor, but the only way to understand whisky is to first try it neat.”

“Okay, neat, I guess.”

The bartender slid our glasses over.

“Cheers,” said Andrew. “Ganbei!”

I drank as instructed. There were many instructions—Andrew would not stop talking. I was to sniff first, observe the color, observe the legs. What were legs?

Andrew said something about spacing and ethanol molecules. I thought I saw them, but I couldn't be sure. I could have been observing something else entirely. I was to take one small sip, hold it on my tongue, swallow, suck in a bit of air, and feel the oxygen interact with the aftertaste. Then I was to have another sip, this time focusing on the subtler notes.

“Can you taste the fruit?” Andrew asked. “The taste is really distinctive to this region. Can you taste the mango?”

It seemed important to Andrew that I taste the mango, so I nodded.

I was trying to determine how old Andrew was. He seemed familiar with all of the undergraduates, but I didn't think he could be younger than twenty-five. He didn't have enough hair. He wore leather sandals that were falling apart, and a faint odor accompanied him wherever he trod. It wasn't a disgusting odor; he didn't seem unshowered or anything. You just got the sense he had been walking around all day and things had accumulated.

He was trying to sleep with me. I might not have realized this before, but I had practice now after my day with J.C. You had a good hunch if guys wanted to sleep with you if they angled their body toward yours in a certain way, like they were trying to block you off from the rest of the room. And you could tell for sure if they were being very nice to you for no reason.

I didn't feel excited or creeped out by this. I just felt tired. How had this happened to me twice in a week? I was not especially sexy, nor did I feel I was giving out strong signals of desire. I was just available. Maybe if Andrew had seen Anna sitting alone in the library, he would be teaching her about Kavalan's distilling techniques instead.

“So how's your time here been?” Andrew asked. He had already drained his Kavalan Classic; now he was drinking the Kavalan Concertmaster. “Did you feel a kind of cultural awakening here in Taipei?”

“Kind of, yeah,” I said. “It's weird. I've never been to a foreign country and felt—I don't know, this instant connection.”

This was the wrong thing to say. Andrew's face lit up, like he had been waiting to spring a trap. “The myth of consanguination,” he crowed. “You're from the mainland, aren't you? Yeah—Guangzhou? I knew it. I thought so. You think because you are essentially Chinese, and they are essentially Chinese, that you have anything in common. But you don't! It's like there was a civil war in the American heartland, and some people fled to Nova Scotia, and everyone else fled to England. And then after growing up in England, your kid visited Nova Scotia and felt this 'instant connection.' Wouldn't you think that was weird?”

There were several missing steps in this argument, but I could see Andrew's point. It was strange, perhaps unethical, for me to lay any cultural claim on this island. Still, it stirred something inside me—was that so wrong? “But probably Taiwan has more of the culture that my parents knew.” I found myself echoing what the tour guide had said at the National Palace Museum. “It's like, not all that unreasonable that I feel some attachment.”

“But which China did your parents grow up in?” Andrew asked. “The one with all that culture, or the one under the Communists? They were probably born right after the Cultural Revolution, right? After they smashed the Four Olds? So then what would they know about authentic Chinese culture?” He took another sip of his whisky. “You know, when you think about it, it's actually ludicrous that all you heritage speakers are hanging out in the same room.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean your parents and grandparents were all on different sides of this decades-long conflict, and it's entirely possible that at some point they were pointing guns at each other. Think about it.” He gestured around the room with his glass. “You've got a kid from Hong Kong, a kid from Singapore, a kid from Beijing, and a kid from Taiwan. So you had Communists and Nationalists and peasants and landlords. Your grandparents would have killed each other, you know?

But here you are, acting like the mere fact of your Chineseness is some centrifugal force. Isn't that bizarre?”

I said it was probably easier to be collectively Chinese because none of our parents had done the actual killing. I didn't know what evidence I had for this claim, but I was fairly sure that neither my parents nor grandparents had ever pointed a gun at anyone.

“But that's precisely it,” said Andrew. “You're swept up in these historical forces. That makes it even worse. You watched it all happen, and you brush over it by saying it's fine, at the end of the day, everyone's Chinese. What the fuck does that even mean? It only sounds like home to you because you can't hear the difference in your accents.”

My mouth tasted bitter. No matter what I said, it seemed to prove Andrew's point about something. I couldn't find the problem with any one of his premises, exactly, but it was cruel of him to mock us for simply wanting to speak our parents' language.

“Then why are you in Taipei?”

This was the right thing to say. Andrew perked up, like he had been waiting for me to ask.

“Well. So it's kind of a long story,” he said. “When I was little, there was this Chinese family who lived down the hall in our apartment building.” The mother worked days and went to classes at night. He never saw the father around. There was a little girl a few years younger than him named Chuchu, and the grandmother, whom Andrew had called Nainai, which was what Chinese children called their paternal grandmothers, because he went over there so often that he started speaking Chinese.

“So they were your babysitters?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said. “We weren't paying them or anything—they didn't work for us. I just went there a lot after school, and they were always having some food, so they gave me some. Nainai used to make these huajuan from scratch. They were so good, huge and fluffy. I liked to watch her knead the dough.

She'd let me sprinkle in the cut scallions. I loved the moment she took them off the stove. How the steam whooshed around her face.

I really felt like I grew up Chinese, you know. Sometimes I even went home and kept speaking in Chinese, and my parents told me to cut it out.”

Andrew's family moved out of the building when he was ten. His father had finally found steady work, and they landed somewhere with more space, fewer cockroaches. They didn't leave behind a forwarding address or stay in contact with the Chinese family. He never saw them again. He didn't even know their legal names.

“I think about them every day,” he said. “I loved them both so much. My Nainai. That woman raised me.”

I drained my Kavalan.

“That's why my accent is so good. I learned tones when I was young. Non-native speakers struggle so much with tones, but I got them right away.” He asked if I wanted to hear him recite some advanced chengyu, and I told him no, that was all right, I believed him.

I thought about getting up and going home. But I didn't want to leave by myself, because then people might think I was antisocial. Also it was very late. I wasn't sure the trains were still running, and I didn't want to walk home by myself. I glanced around, but I didn't see anywhere else in the room where I'd be more comfortable, so I just sat still where I was and kept rolling my whisky glass around in my hands.

My stomach rumbled. Something smelled good. I scanned the room and saw that several of my classmates had ordered pizzas. Everyone was gathered around steaming rectangular pans, except for us. I wished Andrew would wrap this up so that I too could get some pizza.

Andrew had begun to cry. I watched him for a while, wondering if the tears were feigned for my benefit.

“I feel so stupid.” He sniffled. “I don't even have a phone number. I tried looking them up, but I can't find them. My parents don't know either.”

I was peeved he was making such a big deal over this. This didn't seem like anything to truly cry over. It's not like it was his own Nainai, and it wasn't like they'd died or something. I also imagined that if he tried hard enough he could reconnect.

All he had to do was make a viral post on the internet. People reconnected like that all the time these days. This Chuchu girl had to be on TikTok, or at least RedNote—she'd find him for sure.

People would go wild over that. Maybe they would fall in love. Maybe they would become an influencer couple: East meets West.

I made a rambling suggestion to this effect, but Andrew kept shaking his head. He was absolutely certain that Nainai and Chuchu could not be reached—as if once he had left the building, the whole family had ceased to exist.

My temples throbbed. I was so thirsty. I took some sips of water, but it didn't help. I'd never drunk anything this strong before, and I hated what it was doing to me. Andrew felt too present.

My ears rang when he talked. I tried to focus, but the ringing just got louder and louder. All of his physical features seemed too close, zoomed in to garish detail. My vision did something strange then.

I was unable to perceive Andrew's face in full. I could only focus my gaze on minute details. The wet red rings around his eyes. The shine of his saliva, the glint of his single piercing.

There was a fleck of potato chip stuck on his upper lip, and it wobbled whenever he talked. I kept watching, wondering when it would fall off.

At last I decided I didn't need to tolerate this any longer. I was a big girl. I could find my way home through the city. Taipei was famously safe at night. There were a thousand other places I could be right now, and so there was actually no reason in the universe, aside from inertia, why I had to keep sitting here.

“Hey, so it's kind of late. I'm really tired.”

Andrew didn't seem to hear me. He just kept sipping his whisky.

“So I'm going to go now,” I said.

He wiped at his eyes.

I slid off the barstool and maneuvered around his body. Andrew didn't stop me. Anna's gaze flickered toward me as I moved to the door, but when she saw that Andrew wasn't following me out, she turned back to the group.

N.T.U E-PROOF—not FOR SALE

HarperCollinsPublishers

....................................

4

Sticky, roiling sleep. I curled up on the couch, since it was Anna's turn to have the bed and I didn't want to irritate her further when she got home. My stomach churned.

I wished I had never touched the Kavalan. Over my freshman year I had learned of the imperative to “hydrate or die-drate,” and so I drank glass after glass of water, and then I kept having to get up to pee. Anna never came back to the apartment. Around three in the morning I moved to the bed. She was still gone at sunrise. I had two hours before I needed to be at the department and so I lay still, trying to go back to sleep. My teeth felt sour, caked in sugar, though I'd brushed them twice.

I felt soiled on some fundamental level. I chugged more water, hoping it would flush out all this pollution.

I couldn't keep my eyes shut. The sun was too bright. Our apartment was positioned so that shortly after sunrise, the sun pierced through a gap between the concrete walls of the buildings next door.

But I could not get up either; I felt too sluggish. I curled on my side, away from the window. I couldn't think of anything better to do, so I began clicking through my flash cards.

By now I had amassed so many vocabulary words that I could no longer tell which lesson each belonged to. The studying app randomized the order. I could get any word at any time. Chinese text: chaotic. Chinese text: vigorously, violently. Chinese text: a meat kebab.

My phone flashed. A text from my mother. Call me. asap

I was blinking at the screen, trying to figure out whether I should call her or shower first, when a second text flashed.

I'm sorry to tell you Gonggong has passed away.

I sat up and called my mother.

“Mom?”

“Hi, Lily.”

“I saw your text.”

I wanted her to say that she had mistyped. That she had been joking, or had meant to inform me that someone else's gonggong had passed away. But instead my mother began to cry.

My mother did not cry. I had witnessed her crying only once—one night when I was in high school, when she thought my sister Jasmine was dead—and even then she left the room when she saw me and Flora watching. This sound was alien to me. These sobs struck me as fake, the approximation of an emotion—as if I were listening not to my mother but to a recording of some other woman crying in a film, an audiobook, an audition reel. This sound and my mother had nothing to do with each other.

I wondered if I might be dreaming. I had once dreamed, in terrible detail, that my family members were one by one ripped apart by a giant wolf while I watched helpless and screaming. I jolted awake, remembered that there was no wolf, and lay there giddy with relief. The emotional memory of that nightmare was so vivid that when I came downstairs for breakfast, I ran to hug my parents. Surely this was just a bad hangover dream. I dreamed nested narratives like this sometimes; I thought I had awoken, but then strange things began to happen, and I grew more and more panicked until I woke up yet again.

“How?” I asked.

“What?”

My head felt light. “How did he die?”

“He fell,” said my mom. “They had just gotten up. Popo—she was getting dressed, she had some trouble with her buttons. He turned to look at her. And then he fell.”

That was all? How could that be all? Surely there was more to this story—a sharp corner, a staircase—but I couldn't bring myself to ask. I couldn't imagine it either. The last time I was in Guangzhou, I was twelve. I had never visited the apartment they were living in now. I didn't know where to place the stairs, the corners in my imagination. I could only see in the abstract the turn, the tumble.

“Mom.” My ears rang. “Mom, I am so sorry.”

She didn't respond. A long silence on the other end. Then my father said, “Hi, Lily.”

“Hi, Dad.” I was crying now.

“I'm sorry we had to tell you over the phone.”

“No, that's okay.”

“Your mom is very upset.”

“Yeah, I can tell.”

“The funeral is the day after tomorrow. She's flying to China tomorrow with a layover in Taipei. She'll have six hours between her flights, so you can meet her there, okay? The day after tomorrow, at Taoyuan Airport.”

I made him repeat this several times before I gathered the wits to write it down.

“Make sure you're there, okay? Be there for your mom.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“So sorry, Lily. I'll text you the flight number. Take care.”

Then they hung up.

I sat cross-legged on my bed, sniffling and staring at the headboard.

Shock was the concept. We had learned the Chinese last week, Chinese text was the same character used in the word for “earthquake.” Chinese text. Everything turns upside down. The world is in disarray. But nothing about the concept told you how to feel about this, how it sat in your body.

The phrase took you out of your body completely. A great shock, and the soul flees.

I did a tally of my vitals. My fingers were still, my heart pulsing steadily. No trembling. I got out of bed and stood up. My legs worked. I raised my hands above my head. My vision didn't fade.

So the shock had not reached me yet. This scared me. I didn't know when it would hit or how it would feel. Was I sad? How sad was I going to be; how much would that hurt? What if I didn't feel anything at all? I had fainted only once in my life, last October, after I'd donated blood for the first time. I had been so sure I was not afraid of blood or needles, and yet the moment the needle left my arm and I saw the bag I had filled, a dark wave rushed up at me, and the next thing I knew I was lying on a cot, root beer lollipop in hand. That was what I was afraid of. Emotional vertigo. If I began to walk, I didn't know whether or when I would fall.

Now what was I supposed to do with myself?

It was the strangest thing. Time did not come to a halt just because I had received bad news. The seconds kept ticking by and I was still here, and my shock did not keep me from perceiving its passing. I was getting bored.

I thought about going to class, but when I reached for my textbooks, I felt a tremendous inertia, like I'd be pressing against the weight of the world if I tried to put my backpack on and head out to the department. I couldn't. It simply wasn't happening.

But still, I had to get through this day.

I had no one to talk to. Now that Anna and J.C both were not speaking to me, I did not have a single close friend in this city. Earlier in the week, that had seemed like a fixable problem. Words would be exchanged, relationships ironed out. Now Anna and J.C and everyone else in my program seemed planets away.

I decided to act as if it were a Saturday. I moved through my morning ablutions. I brushed my teeth. I washed my hair. That suspicious black grime seeped out from under the door, as always. I wiped it up. The toilet paper bin was full, so I tied off the trash bag and carried it downstairs. I ran back up and washed my hands. I sprayed my legs with Off! I locked the door. I took out my umbrella and walked across the intersection to the Xiaonanmen tofu pudding shop.

“Number one, thanks.” By now I had perfected this exchange. “With ice, for here. And a spoon.”

Three deft scoops, and she passed me my tray. I found a stool by the window and ate, scrolling through my vocabulary cards. Chinese text meant “each has its merits.” Chinese text meant “paralysis.” Chinese text meant “entertainment club.” Chinese text meant “to support oneself in one's old age.” I marked all the cards as “easy.” I had forgotten the context in which I encountered these words, but I saw them often enough that I knew what they meant. The flash card app used an interval learning system: It showed you the cards you struggled with at a higher frequency. I wouldn't see these cards again for two weeks.

I clicked through with blinding speed; sometimes my thumb moved even before I registered the characters. I finished the set in minutes. I clicked the option to “study more,” and fifty more cards loaded in front of me.

I ate mechanically, without looking at my bowl. Sometimes all I got was a mouthful of ice. That was okay. I couldn't glance away from my phone. I couldn't let my mind wander, not even for an instant. I missed my mouth, and a glob of tofu plopped into my lap. Sugar water dribbled down my chin. To fix this I had to do several things at once, and I failed at them all. I wiped my chin and got sugar water all over my hand. I dragged my sticky fingers across my phone, and the touchscreen stopped working. The tofu stain spread across my shirt. I tried to pick the glob up, but it crumbled in my fingers.

Outside the window stood a woman and her child. They were staring at me, I knew, because when I glanced up the woman grasped her child's hand and hurried on.

I could just imagine what she thought of me. Useless girl. Can't speak Chinese. Can't bring a spoon to her mouth. I dragged my spoon a few times around the bowl. I wasn't hungry anymore. I placed my bowl and tray on the counter and stepped into the hot sun, wishing it would melt me into the concrete.

I tried to work out the depth of my sadness. I knew I felt something—some rawness behind my eyes, some pressing weight that made it hard to breathe. Wasn't this grief? But I couldn't decide whether it was a genuine grief, or if I was feeling sad because I was supposed to feel sad. I could not easily recall the details of my gonggong's face.

I could not tell grief and guilt apart. They sat the same way on my chest.

I was also trying to work out the extent of my loss. It was not immediate: I had not seen my gonggong or popo in years. They had lived with us in Boston, once upon a time. They had come over shortly before Flora was born and stayed until she was old enough for preschool. But then, for reasons unexplained to us at the time, my parents decided this living arrangement was not working anymore, and my grandparents returned to Guangzhou.

We had visited some summers when we were children, but then those summer trips became shorter, spread farther apart. Flora had summer camp. Jasmine hated the long flights.

Over the years, our conversations had dwindled to video calls over WeChat. My mother always initiated those calls. I didn't have my grandparents' WeChat numbers. It would have been so easy to figure it out and establish a direct line of contact to my grandparents, and yet I had refused to do it. The extra steps involved—asking my mother for their contact information; adding them; using Google Translate to type out some filial platitudes in Chinese, for we had nothing else to talk about—seemed like insurmountable obstacles. My mother was the conduit to her parents; we spoke only when she'd set up the connection.

I dreaded those calls. They felt so staged. They weren't conversations but scripted rituals. We always did them around holidays, when everyone was home from school, and always after dinner, when it was late in the morning in China. My mother would position me at the center of the table and pronounce in loud, overenunciated Chinese what I was supposed to say before I repeated it:

Gonggong, Popo, hello! How have you been?

Happy New Year! Wishing you good health and happiness!

I am doing great in school. I am studying very hard.

I have been accepted to Yale. Yes, Yale University! No, in New Haven.

Once Gonggong exclaimed, “Lily's gotten chubby!” I was a junior in high school then; I had just learned about eating disorders and was researching how to give myself one. After we hung up, I wailed to my mother, “How does he know I'm fat? How can he tell from just my face?” My mother explained that it was a compliment, that it only meant that Gonggong thought I was growing up, flourishing. But I didn't believe her, and I refused to show my face on WeChat for the next six months.

I knew my sisters also hated these calls, because we were always so eager to hand the phone off to the others. Love you. Love you very much. Here is An-An. Here is Guai-Guai!

We couldn't defend our antipathy. We loved our grandparents; we had only the fondest memories of them. We just couldn't bear the static. Not seeing them at all was better than this fuzzy, inadequate connection, which only reinforced the distance between us. The last time they had spoken to us, meaningfully spoken to us, we had been children.

Now we were verbally arrested, even worse at Chinese than we had been at three, four, and five, and unable to do anything but echo those childish refrains. Gonggong, Popo, hello! It's me! I'm good. I'm very good. I'm studying hard.

Yes, I've eaten. Wishing you good health. Here's Mom, now. Bye-bye.

But I had meant to fix this. I had the perfect plan. I would study Chinese in college, become fluent in short order, and then I would have all the conversations with my grandparents that I had avoided before.

In my imagination, my grandparents would always be there, frozen at the age that I had last seen them, waiting until I was ready to talk. I thought I'd get a second chance. I thought I had the time.

The last time I had spoken to Gonggong was in March, when I was home over spring break. Jasmine was out somewhere, and Flora was still at school, and so my mother corralled me to perform the WeChat call on my own. Gonggong and Popo had moved to a smaller apartment by then, and they had a home health aide, A Zhu, who crouched beside them and held the phone up to their faces so they could see. They didn't react when I spoke. I realized they couldn't hear me. I had to repeat myself several times, each time painfully aware of the slippage in my tones. A Zhu repeated everything I said in her own dialect-inflected Mandarin, shouting into Gonggong's ear until finally he nodded. Popo gave no sign of comprehension. She had suffered a stroke the previous year, and her smile sagged so that she wore a constant grimace, as if even the sight of us put her in pain. After ten minutes of this, A Zhu said that it was time for their nap, and they hung up. The screen went dark. I sat there a moment in silence with my mother.

“They're getting old,” I said.

My mom sniffled. I glanced over and saw her eyes were red.

“Yes.” She stood up. “That's what parents do.”

I wasn't going to the funeral because I couldn't get into mainland China, because I didn't have a valid visa.

It would not have been difficult for me to obtain a visa. I had been in and out of the mainland plenty of times throughout my childhood. At some point, we all held multientry tourism visas. But my passport had expired when I turned eighteen, and this invalidated my visa too, and renewing it involved taking my picture and filling out forms and standing in line at a Chinese consulate, the closest of which was hours away in New York.

Back in January, after I had been accepted to the program, my mother had suggested I visit the mainland after my time in Taiwan. Taiwan didn't require visas from American citizens, but the mainland did. I'd agreed to look into it. But then the spring semester began, and I had to worry about my classes, and then I had to worry about midterms. And then the semester ended, and one month before the trip I didn't have time anymore to apply because then I would have to relinquish my passport, but because so many people wanted to go overseas in the summer, there was a backlog, and the consulate websites could not promise when I would get my passport back, so there would be a chance I couldn't get into Taiwan either. I could have scrounged up the fee for an expedited visa, but the expediting process required you to go to a consulate in person, and I didn't have time to take the train to New York to wait all day for a visa because it was finals, and my ticket home was the morning after my last exam.

I could tell my mother was frustrated, that she felt this proved I did not prioritize my extended family. But she didn't insist. We could go next summer; we would plan better. But now it was too late and there was no point, and there would be no more summers, and I was a shitty granddaughter who couldn't be bothered to fill out some forms, and it didn't matter if I got a visa next year, because I would never make it in time to see my gonggong ever again.

Anna had returned by the time I got back to the apartment. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with Margrit, eating takeout dumplings on the coffee table. I opened the door, and they both lowered their chopsticks.

“Hi, Lily.” Anna stood up. This was a strange move, given how tiny our apartment was. There was nowhere for her to go.

“Um, hi.” We were speaking in English, so I knew what to expect: bitchy Anna.

“Hi, Lily.” Margrit gave me a little wave.

I ignored her. To Anna I said, “You didn't come back last night.”

“Ah.” She shrugged. “Yeah.”

“I got worried.”

“Did you?”

“I texted you.”

“I was fine,” said Anna. “It got late. I crashed at Margrit's.”

This did not make sense to me because Margrit lived at one of the university dormitories, which was twice as far from the bar as our apartment. I figured that whatever Anna had spoken to J.C about, it had made her angrier with me, but that was not a puzzle I could untangle now.

“Anyways,” said Anna, “I'm glad I caught you. I think it's about time we have a chat about our living arrangements.” She cleared her throat. “You've had the apartment to yourself for a few days, so I think it's fair that I should have the space back for a bit.”

“What?”

“Come on,” said Anna. “Don't act so surprised.”

But I hadn't been acting surprised. I was genuinely surprised, and I had said “what” because I wanted her to repeat what she had said. I was having tremendous difficulty processing any speech acts.

In Thought and Society, I had just learned this chengyu: Chinese text, “the mouth of a horse doesn't fit the head of a cow.” It referred to incongruity, such as when the reply didn't fit the question, or when two people talked past one another. It was all I could think about now. I overlaid the image of a cow over Anna's face and saw its lips moving instead of hers.

“Well, I think we're both kind of uncomfortable around each other. Sometimes this space feels actively hostile. I have tried to talk to you about it, and I thought we could move forward, but I don't think it's getting any better—like, just the sound of your footsteps triggers my anxiety, okay?

And at the end of the day, I do have to set some boundaries. My living space should be a safe space for me. So I think the best thing for us is if we spend a little time apart, meaning, I think you should look into some different living arrangements.”

She had obviously practiced this speech. It wouldn't have been so bad if she had just come right out and said those things, because at least some of them were fair. I agreed—the apartment felt like a war zone.

Her footsteps triggered me too! But the way she said it—the full sentences, the therapy-speak—made it obvious she had workshopped this speech with other people, and that meant she had been complaining about me to other people for a while. Probably they had all pitched in with some lines. Tell her about the boundaries. Tell her about your anxiety. Probably they were all waiting for her to tell them how it had gone.

So since I knew I was not having a fight with Anna but with a whole group of traitors of which Anna was the figurehead, I was less inclined to compromise.

“No.”

“Sorry?”

“You can't just unilaterally evict me,” I said. “Fuck—fuck you. No.”

“Oh my God,” said Anna. “Can we be mature about this?”

“You can't kick me out with nowhere to go.”

“Don't you have lots of places to sleep? Like, can't you stay with Andrew?”

“Anna, that is fucked up.”

Anna and Margrit exchanged a glance. Clearly they had been talking about me before I got here—perhaps they had even discussed that I might react this way.

“Anna, come on. My grandfather just died.”

I spoke the words like I was testing them out, seeing if I could even make them fit on my tongue. They didn't seem like words that belonged to me. I was just trying on the role, seeing what kind of reaction they got.

Anna squinted. “What?”

“Just now,” I said. “My mom texted me, she said—” My throat tightened. I had not said it out loud until now. I had not known how difficult it would be. Speaking it made it true. “My grandpa is dead.”

“What does that . . .” She frowned. “You mean just now?”

“Yeah.”

“Like when you were in Beitou?”

“No, this morning,” I said. “A few hours ago. I don't—at least, I found out a few hours ago.”

Anna kept squinting at me. She was trying to determine whether I was lying, and perhaps I did sound like I was lying, but I didn't know how to utter those words in a way that felt true. I could just imagine how she would spin this to the others, to all those traitors waiting for her debrief. So I brought up the bed thing, right. And you won't believe what she said.

“I am so sorry,” said Margrit. “That is a terrible loss.”

“Thanks.”

“Were you close?” asked Anna.

I blanched. “I mean—he was my grandfather?”

“Are you going to the funeral?”

“I can't, I don't have a visa.”

“I see.”

For a moment nobody said anything. I leaned against the door frame. I felt dizzy.

This encounter felt staged, uncanny. It felt as if we were all uttering lines off a script we'd never seen before, but there was no director, and no one was inflecting in quite the way they should. The stakes were so random and unexpected.

How were we supposed to behave? The silence held another moment, and then Anna turned to Margrit and asked, “Can I stay at yours tonight?”

“Oh—yes, sure.”

Anna stomped around the room, shoving more things into her backpack—some clothes, some cans of Off!, an assortment of toiletries. I wondered if she'd dare take our shared body wash. I wondered how long she would stay away. “Okay, let's go,” she told Margrit, and they made their way toward the door. Margrit ducked her head as she passed me. “So sorry for your loss,” she said again.

“Anna,” I said.

She turned around. Her face was very pale, and there were two bright spots of color in her cheeks. I could have told her then that I was hurting, and I needed her, and I was sorry. But that demanded more words than I had at the moment.

I pointed to the table. “You forgot your notebook.”

Now the war was won, and I had the apartment all to myself.

I washed my face. I cleaned my phone with an alcohol wipe. I changed my shirt and stuck it in the washer. Then I sat on the couch, wondering how to make the hours pass.

It was so dark inside this apartment. The incinerating beam of morning light was gone; now I was swathed again in the shade. The ceiling lights barely worked.

I pulled back all the curtains, but that didn't help. Our window opened onto another, taller, apartment building, and we sat in its shadow. This was the problem with Taipei: so little space and all these people, and buildings to house the people; they had nowhere to go but up, and we were trapped in walls against walls.

How had I spent so many weeks in such a dark little box? I sucked in air, expanded my lungs as far as they would go, and still I felt like I was suffocating.

Every worldly problem culminated in the dimness of this apartment. Modernization was a mistake, overpopulation was a mistake, apartments were a mistake, climate change was making Taipei unlivable, and all these things had conspired to make me, in this specific moment, miserable.

I opened my messaging app several times and closed it. Those texts were still there; I hadn't imagined them. I'm sorry to tell you Gonggong has passed away. I always did this with bad news.

It had never worked. I always tried to convince myself I was in a nightmare, and I was so disappointed when I didn't wake up.

My grandmother didn't know yet that her husband was dead.

Popo's health hadn't been good for a while, especially after her stroke. I remembered seeing a video of her rolling out in a wheelchair and feeling stunned by the transformation. In my memory, Popo was vibrant and clever, always poking fun at my mother and sisters.

Popo liked to go on long walks, pushing her arms at her sides in a way I associated with eighties aerobics videos. Popo was not this thin, white-haired creature whose face was all slack, drooping on the left.

When she'd lived with us, Popo had been so proud of how good she looked, even at seventy. She'd still had a head of black hair that she wore short, professionally permed, and she never went outside unless carefully dressed in a smart blouse over trousers. “I kept my figure,” she would tell me, running her hand up and down her waist. “I look younger than everyone my age, don't I?” Chinese text—stature, physique; I knew this word early because my grandmother and my aunts used it so often. They were so concerned with how to Chinese text, how to maintain that good physique. Practice tai chi daily. Be moderate with sweets. The Chinese word for “muscle” was also engraved in my memory, because Popo talked about it all the time: Chinese text. It sounded just like the word for “chicken,” Chinese text, so that when she showed me how she slapped her arms and legs to keep the blood circulating, I was forever picturing her as a raw, supple chicken.

I asked my mother if they were keeping the news from Popo because they were afraid her heart couldn't take it. It was a stupid question, but I had to know. I couldn't leave anything to inference or translation. I wanted to know every detail and its implications.

“I really don't know,” said my mother. “Gonggong was her whole world. They were together all day, every day. You know, he was looking after her when he fell.” This was the third time she had told me this. Every time, she uttered it in a dazed voice, like she still didn't know what it meant. “He was turning around, looking to see if she was all right, and then he fell.”

The next morning, I woke up at four thirty and called a cab. I could afford it; I had been hoarding my scholarship cash. The internet cautioned that the ride to Taoyuan could take between half an hour and ninety minutes, depending on traffic. I could not be late. I left hours early just in case. But there wasn't any traffic at all, and the drive was eerily smooth. All the lights were green.

I fell asleep shortly after I got inside the cab and was disappointed when the driver told me I had arrived. Only thirty minutes had passed. So much more day stretched before me.

I'd never seen an empty airport. It looked unreal; most of the lights weren't on yet. I stepped inside and tried to see if I could make the airport transform into an open soccer field. I was playing mental games with myself again.

I still thought that if I could concentrate hard enough, I could convince myself that none of this was happening, and that this dreamscape would disappear. In the past, I had occasionally been able to achieve lucid dreaming in the middle of a nightmare: I willed, and then I could fly. But the linoleum flooring was too solid. I couldn't turn it into grass.

My mother's flight came up on the arrivals board: San Francisco to Taipei, on schedule.

I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know how to comfort my mother; I had never figured it out. She and my father had fought often when I was younger. Money was always involved; the lessons we could not take, the flights to China we could not afford. My father wore his emotions on his sleeve.

He would smash things, shout, and storm out of the house. It always passed quickly; he had to get it out of his system, and then he would be all right. But my mother turned into stone.

She disappeared behind a death mask. You couldn't tell what she was thinking, and she wouldn't tell you. She could stay like this for days.

No amount of coaxing or apologizing could snap her out of it. Only she could decide when to put us out of our misery.

It was the worst when we were the cause of her anger, when we'd really done something wrong. She would say such cryptic things. “One day you will not have a mother or father,” she would tell me. Or, if I ever fought back, she would say, “Would you prefer that I leave your life forever?” I never knew if she meant this as a threat, or if she herself was afraid—if she was musing out loud about a world where, for reasons unexplained, she couldn't be with us. Either way, this terrified me. This made me work very hard to regain her love. If I didn't, then I might not have a mother anymore, and it would be all my fault.

I was over an hour early. I was the only person in the arrivals area, except for an employee vacuuming the floors around the check-in counters. At six thirty, the shop lights came on. Then a handful of people joined me at the arrivals gate.

A young man holding a bouquet in one hand, yawning into the other. An older couple, clasping hands as they leaned against each other. Several men in dark suits bearing iPads that displayed in large fonts names like “Mr. Volker” and “J. Hudson.”

Seven o' clock. My mother's flight must have just touched down. I tried to imagine her disembarking in real time, so I would know how much longer I had to wait: standing up, waiting for the jet bridge to open, queuing at customs, getting her passport stamped, walking through baggage claim. She would be out earlier; she had not checked a bag. A trickle first, then a wave of rumpled travelers, blinking under the bright lights like they'd just emerged from a cave.

“Mom,” I called, waving. “Mom.”

She turned, and weary relief spread across her face. “Lily, hi.”

We hugged. She was bony, birdlike in my arms. She had always been slim, fastidious about her waistline, but this frailty was new. I had been taller than her since I graduated from high school, but I was somehow disturbed, every time I went home for breaks, to discover that I was in every way larger than she was. She wore sweats and a T-shirt, clothes she almost never wore outside the house, and the effect was that she seemed both little-girlish and very old at once.

I took her in. Saw the lines around her eyes, the gray streaks of hair, the downward slope of her shoulders. It felt like the first time that I had looked at her, really examined her features, rather than filling her in with the memory I knew as Mom. My mother had always been a fixture, an unchanging authority. To me, my parents belonged to that category “middle-aged,” which was in fact ageless and infinite, and now for the first time in my life, I saw she was closer to an old woman than a young one.

How many more years together did we have? How many had I already wasted? Now I had begun to worry, and I would never stop worrying. Because I had researched these things in a panic last night, I wanted to ask her: are you taking calcium supplements, are you getting mammograms, have you considered weight lifting, do you stretch every morning, are you watching your macros, do you have fulfilling hobbies, would you consider taking up gardening, can you do all these things so that you can stick around, so that I will never be a girl without a mother?

“How's your foot?” I had noticed her limping.

“Bad,” she said. “It's been hurting all summer.”

“When are you going to see a doctor?”

“I might see someone while I'm out here. There are better doctors in China.”

My mom walked with a slight limp when she was tired, because she only had nine toes. The fourth toe on her right side ended at a stump, so clean that you wouldn't have noticed anything was wrong except that toe was much shorter and there was no nail. She was very embarrassed about this. She never wore flip-flops or sandals in public, even where no one would come close enough to see.

We all kept encouraging her to get a prosthetic toe, but she never followed through. She didn't trust Western doctors; she thought their methods were too invasive. When she had a bout of shingles, she tried curing herself by heating a piece of string over a candle and burning her rashes.

The shingles spread, and my dad made her get a prescription for antivirals, and then finally the shingles went away. She maintained it was the string that did it. We told her that Chinese medicine was junk, that she had to trust the doctors and at least accept a Tylenol, but she always reminded us about that Chinese scientist who had won a Nobel Prize for her research on traditional medicine. Anyhow, painkillers were bad for you.

You had to feel the depth of the pain or else your body wouldn't know to recover.

My mother wasn't shy about how she'd lost the toe, however. She loved telling that story. “I was walking near a construction site with my sisters,” she would begin. “We always walked home together after school. And we were playing, and there was—you know, something.”

The details ended there. Whenever my mother didn't have the words in English, she filled in the blanks with “you know.” But we didn't know. In my imagination, there was a conveyor belt, like the belt on a treadmill, except it was running so fast it was essentially a saw. As I got older I realized that this made no sense. What would a conveyor belt be doing on the ground at a construction site?

But I didn't have anything else with which to fill in the blanks. Maybe she sliced her toe against an exposed bit of steel. Maybe someone dropped a hammer on her foot.

“I was the last person to notice. I didn't even realize what had happened until my sisters started screaming.” At this point, my mother always grew animated, waving her hands in the air. “Your dayi sprinted home and got our father. We weren't close. I must have been lying there for a while, but in my memory, your gonggong was there in an instant. He took me to the clinic, but it was too late—they couldn't reattach the toe.”

Usually the story ended here, with a rare viewing of the stump as we all shrieked and giggled. But the last time she told it, she had lingered on the end. It was after that spring break WeChat call. She had been moody then, missing her parents more than usual. “Here's what I remember most of all,” she'd said. “How your gonggong just scooped me up in his arms.

He made it look so easy. Then I stopped screaming. I didn't feel the pain at all. I just felt safe.”

I led my mother to the food court on the basement level. There I saw a familiar sign, yellow characters against a red placard. Xiaonanmen, Chinese text, was one of the most famous tofu pudding chains in the city. They had locations across from the Dongmen metro stop and inside the Taipei 101 food court; I had been multiple times to both, and I knew they were good.

“Go sit down,” I told my mom. I felt like a tour guide, like I was responsible for showing her a good time. “I'll get you some douhua.”

When I got to the counter they told me they weren't serving tofu pudding until ten, but they had pork soup dumplings if I wanted to order those. I paid and brought the buzzer back to my mom, along with a plastic tray of cold appetizer dishes covered in plastic wrap. I informed her about the change in menu. I hoped she liked the dumplings.

My eyes prickled; it was hard to speak without crying. I was devastated by my inability to do this one thing for her: bring her the tofu pudding I said was so good.

“Oh, soup dumplings.” My mother peered over the tray like one might examine a jewelry display at the mall, with no intention of picking anything up. “They don't have good soup dumplings in Boston.”

She jabbed her chopsticks at the pickled wood ear mushrooms.

“I can get you a cup of soy milk,” I said.

“No soy milk. It's not good for your throat.”

“Tea, then?”

“Okay.”

I got up to ask for some tea. They didn't have any ready yet—it was still brewing. I asked if they had anything to drink, anything at all. The checkout girl must have sensed that I was about to cry because she disappeared for a moment, then came back with a cup of hot water and a tea bag that clearly came from the staff room. I tried to pay, and she shook her head. “Just take it,” she said.

My mother ate like a bird, plucking a tiny piece of each small dish in turn and nibbling it with her lips. The only thing she seemed to like was the pickled wood ear mushrooms. I urged her to have a soup dumpling. She seized one between her chopsticks, dabbed it meticulously in soy sauce and vinegar, and then popped it in her mouth.

“Mm,” she said. “Very good.”

I felt a surge of protective concern watching her, as if she were the baby and I the parent, and if I could just care for her well enough, all her suffering would go away.

“So,” she said. “The funeral is tomorrow.”

In a calm and distant voice, she recounted the details. Her older sisters both lived in Guangzhou, and they had organized the proceedings. It would be a small affair.

Gonggong had no surviving siblings. Our generation would be represented by my cousin Sting and his wife. I didn't know my cousin's Chinese name; for as long as I could remember, we had all addressed him as Sting. No one else was able to come back to China in time.

“Is there anything that we can do?” I meant myself and my sisters. “Like, send in a video or something?”

“No, it's okay. We aren't playing videos.”

“Will there be like . . .” I didn't know how else to put it. “Like, any special traditions?”

“Not really,” said my mother. “Well, I suppose we'll set up an altar. But they weren't that religious.”

I had no understanding of Chinese burial rites. I'd never attended a Chinese funeral, or any funeral for that matter. I had visited the ancestral grave in my father's village—the plot where his grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents were buried.

But I'd never seen such a plot on my mother's side. I'd never thought to ask why they didn't have one.

“Is there an ancestral grave?”

“No, I think we'll cremate him.”

“Will there be a procession or anything?”

“No. You're really not missing much, Lily. It's okay.” She wiped her mouth and cleared her throat. “The important thing is just for you to remember that your gonggong was a good man. There aren't many good men like that anymore. He was kind.” She nodded. “He took good care of his family.”

I began to cry.

My mother watched me for a while and then handed me a napkin. “Don't cry. It's bad for your heart.”

I wiped my eyes. “Don't you want to cry?”

“I did cry,” said my mother. “When I just found out. And I cried a bit on the plane. But now I'm done. You can't feel that way all the time. It's not good for you.”

After breakfast we returned our trays to the counter and took the escalator back upstairs to the arrivals lounge. I felt a low thrum of panic. Her flight wasn't until one o'clock; we had four more hours to kill. It was just barely enough time to head into the city, but she didn't want to leave the terminal.

It wasn't that I didn't want to be around my mother. I'd just never known how to spend time with her. My mother's love was expressed through worry, and most of our conversations involved whether we were fed, if we had slept, if we had done all our homework, and if we were getting in trouble. Because I was the smart one, the responsible one, I became her repository for my sisters' problems, and whenever I had my mother to myself, all we talked about was whether I thought Jasmine was having sex already, and whether she had a new boyfriend, and whether that new boyfriend was too old for her. I hated these conversations; I hated being burdened with problems that I had no power to fix. Every time we were together I counted down the minutes until I could be alone, and then the moment we parted, I was racked with guilt.

I always wanted to run back to my mother, to offer to spend eternity by her side. But I didn't actually want that. I just wanted to feel like I was the kind of daughter who did.

Once, when I was in ninth grade, my mother had told me that it was lucky I was so good at school, because if they didn't have me, if they just had Jasmine, then my father would have killed himself a long time ago. Keep it up, she said. So that was the kind of relationship we had.

“Taiwan is a good country,” my mother murmured, peering around the airport. “Very clean, very civilized.”

I hadn't realized this was her first time in Taiwan. I'd assumed both my parents were familiar with Taipei, but then, what reason did they have to come here? They weren't from here. When they flew home, it was to the mainland.

“Why didn't we move here?” I asked.

“Your father wanted to go to the U.S.”

“No, I mean like—after the war.” My grandparents hadn't been ardent Communists. They didn't love Mao; they'd survived him. “Why did you all stay in the mainland?”

“Because your grandfather is a patriot,” said my mother, as if this explained anything.

The gift stands were beginning to open. The metal grates were gone, replaced by soft lights and smiling attendants in tight buns and crisp uniforms. Embossed tins in elegant stacked displays: mooncakes, nougat crackers, tins of loose-leaf oolong, and pineapple cakes in six different flavors. My mother examined every shelf with great interest. One by one she held the items up to me and asked if I wanted them. “What about a wooden comb?”

“I already have a comb.”

“What about these pineapple cakes?”

“I don't like pineapple cakes.”

“Oolong tea? This rose oolong looks very good.”

“Mom, I have another month here. I can get oolong tea on the street.”

“Oh.” She put the tea tin down, and only then did I see the dazed expression on her face. My chest tightened. “Of course.”

We drifted from one gift stand to the next. They all sold the exact same products, but we treated each new storefront like it was full of promise, like this one tin of pineapple cakes might be the best of all the pineapple cakes we'd seen.

“So the program,” said my mother. “Are they teaching you any Chinese?”

“I feel like my Chinese is getting way better.” I realized we had been speaking English all morning, but it was too late in the day now to switch. “We're learning how to make classical allusions too. Like Confucius.” I wanted to show off. In Thought and Society, we had slowly accumulated a number of sayings from the Analects that were still quoted regularly in everyday life. The words just slipped out, before I had time to consider what they meant. Chinese text. “When your parents are still alive, do not wander far.”

My mother set down the tin of pineapple cakes and stared at me. Her eyes were red. Her hand trembled, and for the briefest moment, I thought she might slap me. “Why would you say that?”

“It's just something we learned. Sorry, Mom—it's just a quote.”

She shook her head, and it seemed she was talking to the air more than to me. “But why do they teach that?”

We took the escalator up to yet another food hall. My mother kept asking me if I was hungry. This was an olive branch: I had been forgiven.

She read things off menus like they were rare, astonishing delicacies. Did I want salted duck congee? Hainan chicken rice?

I did consider it every time she asked, because eating would be a nice way to pass the time. A meal gave you structure. You considered the menu, you ordered your food, the food came, you picked your way through it, and then you paid the bill.

All together this could take up to an hour, if we really dragged our feet. Each time she asked, I imagined putting food in my mouth, and my stomach roiled. No, I told her; I wasn't in the mood, not yet.

We kept wandering. The arrivals lounge had seemed so enormous when I first arrived; all the storefronts bursting with possibility, goodies from another world. But now I had been inside the city, and it was clear these stores were just holding areas, facsimiles of real life to hold your attention until you could move on.

I had stopped checking the time. This was my world now. I had lived in Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport forever. The seconds slowed to a trickle, and I had resigned myself to this liminal space, this hollowed-out feeling of having nothing to look forward to, but nothing to move on from. This felt purifying.

Penance for not feeling the right kind of grief. I had to step out of time, outside routine and expectation, and see what that felt like. There was no shape to the day, only the silence, and its weight.

We walked with no direction. We turned down hallways just to see where they led. We rode the elevator to the other side of the gift concourse. “You can't get to security from here,” a guard told us. He asked what we were up to, and my mother said we were just walking around. He asked to see her boarding pass.

Then he told us we had to go back to the main lounge, even though the gift concourse was clearly open to the public. I wanted to argue, but my mother said it was okay. She hadn't found anything she wanted to buy.

We decided to go up to the fifth-floor viewing platform. We had seen several signs indicating its existence, though it was harder than expected to find. We couldn't get there from the third or fourth floors. We had to go around the back of the first floor and take a series of escalators, then walk through a series of doors that seemed like they were off-limits but weren't. At last we emerged onto a large balcony facing the landing strips.

Five people were already up there. They were all men. They didn't seem to know one another. They were sitting on different benches, and they wore different kinds of clothes. One man wore a full suit and sunglasses.

One was dressed in what looked like a maintenance uniform and was curled up asleep on his bench. None of them so much as glanced our way. They just kept gazing at the airfield.

I wondered who they were. This seemed like a weird place to wait for a flight, so far from the food halls and security gates. Maybe they were commuters.

Maybe they went to Tokyo every week and came home on the weekends; maybe they knew the schedule by heart and knew down to the minute when they had to go downstairs. Maybe they weren't flying at all. This seemed more likely—none of them had luggage. One of them, the young man smoking by the balcony, wasn't even wearing a shirt. Maybe they all worked at the airport in different capacities. Maybe they were on break. Maybe they just liked planes.

One of the men held a black camera with a lens nearly a foot long, and every time a plane rushed down the runway he raised it and clicked the shutter a dozen times until the plane was cleanly in the air.

I looked over at my mother. She had put on her sunglasses. She sat with her arms folded in her lap, her feet crossed at the ankles. She was perfectly still, her mouth relaxed.

For once, I felt no pressure to fill the silence. No questions, no platitudes: just the occasional click of the camera and the rising and falling roars from the airfield. We sat there for a long time, watching the planes take off.

N.T.U E-PROOF—not FOR SALE

HarperCollinsPublishers

....................................

5

When I was a child I learned a mental trick by which I could reduce bad things to abstractions. It didn't matter if my sister was threatening to hang herself, or if my father was threatening to hang himself, or if everyone was screaming and smashing things downstairs. I determined that none of it could affect me. It had nothing to do with me, and I couldn't do anything about it anyway, and so it wasn't real. So as long as I locked my door and put on my headphones, I could make the rest of the house melt away and pretend nothing else existed, that the muffled thumps from below were hallucinations, and that the entire world was limited to the things inside my bedroom: my bed, my desk, and my books. I would stay there until the danger had passed. In college I was assigned to read passages from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and I learned that this mindset was called Stoicism. You couldn't control external events, but you could control your reactions to them. Things hurt you only as much as you let them.

It was important to put things in perspective. Loss was bad because your world was missing something, correct? Okay—so I took a tally of what I'd lost. Gonggong was gone. My mother was in mourning. That was unfortunate.

But nothing substantive was missing from my life. I had not seen my gonggong much for the past few years. I had not planned to see him much in the future. During the vast majority of my days, he did not cross my mind, and wasn't it irrational to mourn a relationship I didn't have?

What I had lost, really, was the occasional video call that I dreaded to begin with. So while his death was real, objectively speaking, there was a subjective sense in which his death did not figure in my life in any significant way. And so if I focused hard enough, perhaps I would not have to go through the grieving process.

Perhaps I could pretend that this hadn't happened and go back to focusing on my classes.

But when I woke up the next morning I still felt that terrible weight across my body, and it still hurt to breathe.

I thought about skipping class and staying home for the third day in a row. I weighed the two options in my head: the discomfort of sitting for hours in the department, or the discomfort of sitting at home alone. But then I received an email saying I was wanted urgently in the program office. That did it. Above all else, I hated disappointing the authorities.

“Hi, Lily.” Teacher Xu—the program director—was waiting for me in the office. I knew then that I was in serious trouble. “How are you doing?”

She gestured at the chair across from her, so I sat down. “I'm okay.”

“And how do you feel about the program so far?”

“Pretty good, I guess.” It was hard to look her in the eyes. “I like all my classes.”

“I'm glad to hear that.” Teacher Xu leaned forward. “Your teachers say that you're making good progress, and that you are typically well prepared and active in class. However, I'd like to remind you about our program's attendance policy. So far you have missed three days, without once communicating with the office. This is unacceptable, Lily. First, it is disrespectful to your teachers. Second, if you miss any more classes, then you risk failing the program.”

“I understand.”

So they had had faculty meetings about me. They had discussed whether I was a good student or not, and if not, then what should be done with me. This had never happened to me before. My best quality was being unobtrusive. I had never posed a problem to anyone, for any reason.

“I know it is very exciting to be in a new city for the first time,” said Teacher Xu. “You're away from home, you have a lot of freedom, and there are many fun opportunities. You may, for instance, wish to go on day trips with your classmates. But I urge you to contain those trips to the weekends.

You are here on a government grant, correct? Those grants are to support your studies. They are not meant for . . . resorts.”

So the rumors about Beitou had reached Teacher Xu too. I was horrified. I needed her to understand that I was not this person she imagined. I was a good, diligent Chinese girl; I did all my homework, I showed up to class, I did not break the rules, and I did not go to hot springs resorts to do vile things with the other gender.

But I had missed all those classes. I had gone to Beitou with J.C and I had been naked in that tub and I had drunk all that whisky at the bar with Andrew. I had become this person in Taipei: a bad girl who did not prioritize her studies.

“I'm very sorry I missed class yesterday,” I said. “My grandfather passed away.”

“Ah.” Teacher Xu's expression softened. “I see. That's—I'm sorry to hear it. So you went to his funeral?”

“No, the funeral is in Guangzhou. It's today, actually. My family is in Guangzhou. But my mom, she . . .” I didn't know how to say “layover.” I struggled for a moment, and that made every next word a battle to pronounce, and then all I managed to get out was some gibberish to the effect of “She came here first, and then I went and saw her, and then she went to Guangzhou.”

“I understand.” I couldn't tell if Teacher Xu believed or understood me, but she didn't react the way I had hoped. “That is very sad to hear, of course. But that is still an unexcused absence.”

I was discovering that one could not get a lot of emotional capital trading upon a grandparent's death. My other teachers reacted the same way when I told them why I'd missed class: They said they were sorry, and then they reminded me of my overdue homework. I was disappointed, and guilty about feeling disappointed. I had really thought everyone would be nicer to me, all things considered.

I got the sense that grandparents did not count. Siblings counted. Parents counted. They were present in your life in ways that mattered. You could get tons of sympathy by telling people your mother or father had died.

But it was no surprise when a grandparent died. Grandparents were defined by their declining health, by their dementia and hip-replacement surgeries and chemotherapy. Your whole childhood was preparation for your grandparents dying.

Parents died, and people understood if this wrecked you for a year, for many years. Grandparents died, and it was very sad, but that was just part of growing up. You were supposed to walk it off.

In Modern Taiwanese Literature, we were on a good run with stories about death.

We had just finished reading an experimentalist science fiction short story by an author named Bei Chuan. I had to read it a few times to understand what was happening. The main character's father has recently passed away, but the main character keeps seeing him pop up on street view in Google Maps. Eventually he is able to confront his father's ghost, who reveals that Google hires ghosts of the recently deceased to photograph distant locations for its navigation apps. In death, his father gets to go exploring like he never did in life. All this makes the main character feel better about his father's passing. He's not really gone, after all; he's just exploring the North Pole.

Shuya wanted to know if Google had sponsored the story, and Teacher Lin said that she didn't know.

Teacher Lin asked us if any of us had lost family members or had stories we wanted to share about grief. We sat silent for a moment.

“Of course, Lily's grandfather recently passed away,” said Teacher Lin.

I said I didn't have anything interesting to say about it, and Teacher Lin didn't press.

Meijuan offered, “My father died a few years ago.”

A parent was a big deal. We all made some noises of sympathy.

Meijuan went on. This had happened back in Myanmar, during the height of the pandemic. Meijuan's whole family had come down with Covid at the same time. She and her siblings had fairly mild cases, but their parents' fevers weren't breaking, and their oxygen levels were low.

She and her sister had planned to take their parents to the hospital. It was hard back then to secure hospital admission, but they had made some calls, and a friend knew a friend, and so on. They had a car booked and everything. That morning, while she and her sister were eating breakfast, their father called out and asked for a sponge bath. “At first we ignored him,” she said. “I mean, we were tired too, and we were in the middle of breakfast. So we finished eating first, and then we went to go wipe him down.

He was covered in sweat. He was really struggling. But he'd been like that for a while, so I thought we still had time. But then when I was patting his neck I noticed he wasn't breathing.

And I realized he'd just died. In my arms. Just like that.” She made a gesture with her hands to show us how she had held him: like she was a groom and her father's corpse was her bride.

None of us said anything, so Meijuan went on. The real nightmare was scheduling his funeral during lockdown. No one could travel. Her younger brother, the only one who didn't have Covid, had to go out and oversee the cremation. All the funeral homes would turn you away if the cause of death was Covid, so he'd lied and said their father had died of a stroke.

“Why did he have to oversee the cremation?” Shuya asked.

“To make sure the body is burned properly,” said Meijuan. “Otherwise they might just throw it away, or even sell it on the black market.”

“Does that happen a lot?” I asked.

“Does it have to do with the organ trade?” Shuya asked.

“I don't know,” said Meijuan. “But better safe than sorry.”

“Was it hard to watch?” Teacher Lin asked.

“I don't know,” Meijuan said again. “My brother didn't say. He was very quiet when he came home, but then we never spoke of it again.”

I thought of another friend, from India, whose father had recently passed. In her village, it was traditional for the family to witness the body as it burned. I too had asked her if it was difficult to watch her father transformed to ash, and she'd said no; actually, it was cathartic, it let her recognize this earthly husk wasn't her father anymore, that her father's soul had gone somewhere else. I recounted all this out loud, because I wanted to practice talking about “grief” and “catharsis.” But I got stuck trying to explain what I meant by “catharsis,” and my dictionary app seemed not to recognize the word. Teacher Lin didn't understand what I wanted to express either, so we had to settle for the phrase for “release,” which could also be glossed as “liberation.” Shuya asked Meijuan if her brother might have felt this kind of liberation.

“Yes, maybe,” said Meijuan. “My brother didn't actually watch the body burning, though. He just saw it go into the chute.”

Teacher Lin told Meijuan she was very sorry for her loss.

“It's all right,” said Meijuan, although her eyes were red. “It's been a few years.”

There were still fifteen minutes left in class, but none of us knew what to say. I had nothing to offer regarding Gonggong's death. I hadn't been there; I couldn't supply details such as he had just asked for a sponge bath. I composed a sentence in my head, but I couldn't speak it out loud, it sounded so stupid. He fell. 倒. Dǎo. Such a generic word. I didn't have the words for the gritty, material reality of what had happened: a fragile frame, a railing that wasn't there.

Anything could dǎo to the floor. A stack of laundry. Water from a cup. A toddler learning to walk. Things toppled over all the time, and it was just too bad that my gonggong died from it.

Shuya told us that his parents and grandparents were still alive, so unfortunately he had nothing to contribute. He showed us a picture from a recent family gathering. We congratulated him on his good fortune.

“My husband's sister's husband died a few years ago,” said Teacher Lin. “He had cancer. It was very sad, because he had two small children, and they had to explain to them how Daddy wasn't going to be around anymore. They took lots of photos of him before he died. It was fascinating, actually—they had him pose in various positions so they could Photoshop him into important events later. Graduations, weddings, that sort of thing. A digital solution to grief. Sort of like in the story.” She showed us a photo on her phone. “See, here he is, in last year's Christmas card. You can't even tell he's not really there.”

She passed the phone around. We took turns admiring the photo and agreed: The Photoshop had been very good.

Teacher Lin said that next week's story was about the author's sister's suicide, and it was a bit graphic, so we could skip it if we wanted. She apologized that we had been reading so much dreary stuff lately. We told her it was okay. We were tough.

Also, we wanted to learn all the relevant vocabulary around suicide. That was the whole point of these elective courses. You learned all sorts of phrases to do with the texture of life. It was important to learn terms like “clinical depression” and “coal burner.” You never knew what might come up one day.

“Lily, hi!” Teacher Sun was typing something on her keyboard when I entered the classroom. “I see you took some leave this week?”

“My grandfather died,” I said. I had more practice uttering this by now, and this time it rolled smoothly off my tongue. “I had to go meet my mother at the airport.”

“Oh, Lily.” Teacher Sun's expression softened. “I am so sorry. But you should really say that he passed away.” She typed the correct characters on the screen for me to see. Chinese text: literally, “to depart from the world.” She put a big X next to the term that I had used: Chinese text. “Passing away is much more dignified,” she explained. “Dying is for animals.”

She must have noticed my stricken face, because she didn't make me go through that week's vocabulary. Instead we went over some formal condolences that I could say at Chinese funerals, if ever the occasion came up.

- Chinese text: Restrain your grief, and obey change.

- Chinese text: Restrain your grief and take care of yourself.

- Chinese text: Please restrain your grief.

“These are all very formal, elegant sayings,” said Teacher Sun. “You can say these to the bereaved, and people will be really impressed!”

None of these seemed appropriate to text my mother. I asked Teacher Sun if there were any phrases that didn't have to do with restraint.

“No, no, it's actually very comforting,” she said. “I guess it sounds kind of bossy in translation. But it's a kind expression. It shows your concern.”

Funeral went well, my mother texted in the family group chat. Grandpa was very well respected.

She did not elaborate further or send any pictures. My father reacted with a thumbs-up.

When I got home from the department I shrugged off my backpack and crawled to the floor. I lay flat on my back and stared at the ceiling for a while, pondering my circumstances. I had five weeks left in Taipei: an eternity. There were so many events still on the syllabus. Weekly quizzes. Four more Thought and Society essays, four more speeches, five more texts each in Modern Taiwanese Literature and Considering the News. Final exams, a final presentation.

A graduation ceremony. These did not seem like real events. They seemed like insurmountable speed bumps on a tar pit of time. To get to the finish I would have to do all these things, and I could not do all these things because I could not even stand up.

I wanted so badly to go home. All those differences I had thought myself acclimated to now seemed unbearable—the heat, the rain, the tight alleys, the mosquitoes. I wanted to see a parking lot. I wanted to see a movie without subtitles.

I wanted to eat pizza—not a “fruit pizza” topped with dragon fruit and strawberries, a real pizza, with a thin charred crust and salty tomato sauce. More than anything I wanted to be in my own room, under my comforter, burying my face in my quilted baby pillowcase that had been rubbed so thin that it couldn't be machine-washed. I wanted to sit with my homework sprawled over the dining room table instead of always hunching over this narrow coffee table with my elbows on my knees, and when I thought about how much time I still had to spend here in this place that was not my home, I felt the blind panic of a child lost at a supermarket.

I clicked around the airline website, and when I saw it would in fact save money to switch my flight to an earlier return date, I felt a brief, delirious wash of relief.

But how would I explain my decision to quit? I would not get academic credit for the program. I might have to pay all my scholarship money back, and if I failed the program I was fairly certain I would never receive funding to go back again. And then I would have failed at the one thing I was good for: studying hard and getting good grades.

My mother asked if I wanted to talk to Popo over WeChat. When the call connected, I saw the three of them on a couch in the living room, as if they were posing for a picture: Popo in the middle, with my mother and A Zhu, Popo's health aide, sitting on either side of her. “Hi, Li-Li!” said A Zhu. A Zhu was Fujianese. I could just barely make out everything A Zhu said, because she spoke Mandarin with my family, but she pronounced words like she wished they were something else.

“Hello, Popo, how are you?” Sloppy words, the wrong words, but I said them anyway. I found myself waving and putting on a high-pitched and cheery affectation, the way I would have spoken when I was a child. “I'm in Taipei now, working on my Chinese. I miss you.”

Popo didn't react at all when I spoke. I wasn't sure that she heard anything I said. Even when A Zhu shouted my words into Popo's ear, she still didn't react. A long moment passed, and then Popo mumbled something that I couldn't make out. A Zhu repeated whatever it was to my mother, who said, “It's Li-Li. Li-Li, remember?”

Popo stared down at her knees.

My mother said, louder, “Li-Li, your granddaughter. My daughter. Number two, remember?”

Popo made a noise that sounded like ungh, which could have been assent, or just discomfort. I wondered when, and how, we could end this call.

“Li-Li has some questions for you,” said my mother. “She wants to know more about your life, isn't that fun?”

Popo made that sound again. Everyone seemed to take this as a yes.

“Go on,” my mother told me. “What do you want to ask her?”

Everything. Everything was a shameful blank to me. I wanted to know about Popo's childhood, her family, what kind of background she had come from. What the war—the wars—had been like for her. How she and Gonggong had met, and what it was like building a family during the upheavals of Communist rule—the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, the death of Mao. But I couldn't tell how much Popo could handle. So I just asked, “How did you meet Gonggong?”

That same cycle again: A Zhu shouting my words back, then my mother, and then finally a glimmer of life from Popo.

She didn't give her answer all at once. Popo seemed to have lost the ability to speak in full sentences. Instead she uttered phrases, sometimes linked together, sometimes disjointed thoughts. After several painstaking minutes, what I made out was this:

“He was older, and I was younger.

“At first, all he did was watch. Me.

“He was watching me.

“Taking care of me.

“He always took care of me.”

“I see,” said my mother.

A Zhu said something to my mother, who said to me, “Lily, I think Popo needs to rest now.”

I pretended not to be relieved. “Okay.”

“Say goodbye.” A Zhu lifted Popo's hand and made it wave. “Goodbye, Li-Li! We'll talk again soon!”

“Popo, Chinese text,” I said. Literally, I'm thinking of you, “I” + “think” + “you”, but in Chinese it meant more. 想 had so many glosses. I miss you, I want you, I desire you, I wish you were here. “Popo, I miss you very much.”

She continued staring off into space as if she hadn't heard.

A Zhu handed the phone to my mother. My mother turned the camera onto her own face as she walked into another room. There were shadows under her eyes. The gray around her temples seemed more pronounced than before. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Popo knows who you are, she's just very confused these days.”

“That's okay,” I said. “How is she doing?”

“She keeps asking where he is.”

“Did you tell her he passed away?”

“Yes. Many times.”

“Do you think it's going to register at some point?”

“I don't know.” My mother shook her head. “Honestly, I think we should stop reminding her. I'm scared she'll decide not to wake up.”

On Monday, I had a meltdown in Thought and Society.

The material that day was not so difficult. Our reading was about whether Taiwanese voters should have the right to recall corrupt officials through a special process. I had studied the vocabulary list the night before and felt fine about it: political party, vote, right, authority. All easy, recognizable characters.

But that was just the problem. They were easy characters because they were abstract and had a million different uses, and this made it hard for me to speak in the particular about them.

I was meant to come up with a sentence about the obligations of elected officials to their constituents. I knew the relevant words, but I didn't know how to slot them into a sentence. I threw all the constructions I knew around it until it came out convoluted and stupid, a winding clause that I didn't know how to close.

“So the citizens, because they want to have the ability to interrogate the officials, they are inclined to . . .” I halted. My mind was totally blank—I knew neither what I wanted to say nor how to say it. “They . . .”

Teacher Cai watched me, waiting. I wished she would move on, but that wasn't how she ran the class. She always let a silence stretch.

It wasn't cruel. It was good pedagogy, part of the program's philosophical approach. Many heritage speakers arrested their language ability at a novice level because they skirted away from difficult constructions in everyday conversation.

We didn't like awkward pauses, we didn't like to struggle with our speech, and so we remained in the safe, easy territory of the subject-verb-object. I eat an apple. I do homework. But to push ourselves to speak in more complex clauses, we had to muck around with the long, frustrating silences. So no one else in the class found it strange, or even uncomfortable, that I couldn't get the sentence out. This happened all the time.

Teacher Cai prodded. “The citizens are inclined to what?”

I had never felt this blankness before. I was used to being so quick. I always knew the answer. Meaning was supposed to flow easily for me because I was such a good student.

But the words would not come. It was not like my second week of class, when I had halted often because my brain was forming new connections and erasing bad habits. A wall was thrown up in my mind. I was totally outside language, beyond communication.

I don't know, I tried to say. But I opened my mouth and found that I didn't have the words for that either.

The silence stretched. Teacher Cai cocked her head. I felt no malice from her.

This wasn't punitive. She was deciding how much more I could take. But finally she must have seen there was no hope here, because she turned to Shanhong, and didn't call on me again for the rest of class.

The Singaporeans kept their eyes fixed down at their notebooks. Shanhong tossed me a sympathetic smile.

When class was over, I went up to Teacher Cai's desk. I had to apologize for this rupture. I wanted her to know I still liked her, that I was trying hard—that I was the good immigrant daughter she expected me to be.

But how could I explain this choking feeling? It was all just so beside the point. I could not speak Chinese and it was clear by now I was never going to learn. I would always be straining for words, yanking my tongue back from incorrect tones, and it didn't matter anyway because my Chinese was not good for anything, I did not live here and I would never live here, and I didn't have family here, and it didn't matter that I converse fluently about mayoral politics in Taipei because I couldn't vote here, and Taipei had nothing to do with me, so who were we fooling? What was this all for?

What I said was “I'm very sorry, teacher. It won't happen again.”

Teacher Cai gave me a wary glance. She still thought this was a problem of attendance—that I was a slutty delinquent. “Just review your vocabulary list next time,” she said. “It's not good to miss so much class, okay?”

Stoicism, I reminded myself. Stoicism.

My gonggong was gone and I hated Taipei and I did not have any friends but none of this had to bother me because I wasn't here to feel happy, I was here to get an education, my university had paid for me to be here, and this was what I would focus on for the next few weeks: keeping my head down and doing my homework. Take refuge in the back roads of the self, said Marcus Aurelius. Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed, and you haven't been.

It didn't work.

I wasn't resilient enough. It didn't matter that nothing had functionally changed about my days. It still felt like the bottom had dropped out from my world, and I couldn't get the taste of ash out of my mouth, and when I looked at my textbooks I felt no interest in applying myself to their contents, because I couldn't see the point of doing anything at all. All I could think about was that my gonggong wasn't alive anymore, and I didn't even have memories to treasure, and that was entirely my fault.

When I got home from the department, my knees buckled, and I was crying before I hit the floor.

I simply could not stop crying these days. I cried every evening before bed. I cried at random intervals during the day.

I cried a bit in the mornings before I left for the department. It was not the frequency that surprised me but the sudden onslaught of these crying fits. There was no warning; a sniffle would escalate to full-blown sobs in a matter of seconds. It didn't matter what I'd been doing or what I'd been thinking about.

I had no choice in the matter. I could just be working on my homework or walking home from the bus stop, and then I would remember that Gonggong was dead, and my thoughts would follow the same stupid patterns. No, he was not dead.

How could he be dead? But he was indeed dead, and this was irreversible. I would never see him again, and nothing I did could change this. I would reflect on these basic facts, and then tears would start pooling in my eyes.

I knew I couldn't do anything to stop it. If anything, I'd gained an appreciation for the inevitability of the process. I was familiar now with all the stages: The beginning, when my eyes got very hot and raw under my skin and it felt like a tap had been turned on behind my nose. The buildup, the hiccups and the short, desperate breaths. The peak, the painful part, when my sobbing approached a seizure and I couldn't breathe and my ribs really hurt.

I always ended up on the floor because it strained my core to sit up. I could not remember crying this hard in my life. I had never felt all this pressure inside me with nowhere to go. At this point the crying became independent of anything I was thinking or feeling, and my mind drifted aloof while my body went through round after round of involuntary spasms. I was fascinated by the phonemes of my cries—the way my sobs nearly formed intelligible syllables but fell just short.

What was the linguistic function of my crying? If babies cried to get attention, then why did adults cry when they were alone? What was I trying to communicate, and to whom?

Eventually my sobs subsided, but then my sinuses clogged up, and there was always a brief panic when I couldn't get air. I was a disgusting crier. Something leaked from every orifice: tears, snot, phlegm.

I couldn't breathe through my nose anymore; I had to suck in air through my mouth and then blow out into a tissue. At first my sinuses were so clogged that the blowing only gave me a headache. Sometimes my ears popped. But if I persisted in blowing, then snot would start coming out in huge, satisfying clots, and then my airways would open up.

After, a light and empty feeling. I sat still, just breathing. I felt hollowed out. Like a spoon had dug out everything wet and dirty inside me and now I was empty, dazed, clean.

This wasn't a bad feeling. Perhaps this was one of the functions of crying: to purge the capacity for grief, even just for a little. It was the only time when I didn't feel that weight on my chest. I didn't feel good, but I didn't feel anything. At least, for a few minutes after, I didn't feel bad.

A few days later, my mother sent me a video of Popo.

She looked so pained to be in front of the camera. Her face was strained in a rictus of discomfort. I could never determine with old people whether they were in active pain, or if their faces were stretched that way even when they were at peace. But it really didn't seem like Popo was enjoying herself.

I hit play on the video. Popo sat, staring into space. Then my mother's voice: “Popo! Popo. Say hi to Li-Li. Tell Li-Li you love her.”

“Li-Li, ah.” Popo's expression did not change. If anything, the downward tug of her mouth grew more severe. She repeated, with no inflection, “Hello, Li-Li, I love you.”

This was something Popo would never say, because Popo didn't speak like that. Popo asked about how we were doing in school, she mentioned if we had gotten taller, and she reminded us to eat well and exercise. That was how Popo expressed her love. She was talking like this only because my mother was coaching her from behind the camera to say the precise words my mother thought I wanted to hear. Still I saved the video and played it over and over again until I fell asleep.

I missed Anna.

I was still angry with her for all the same reasons, but I hadn't known how I would crave her physical presence. I wished she would fill up her corner of the apartment again, grease stains and all. I missed falling asleep to the sound of her soft, even breathing.

I missed her little piglet snores. Her snores weren't annoying so much as they were absurd—cute, tiny grunts that always began around two or three in the morning. Sometimes they woke me up, but I wasn't upset about it. Anna was so self-conscious about her snoring, even when asleep. If I cleared my throat, or even shifted in bed, the snoring always stopped.

But now the apartment was silent, and there was nothing so frightening as the nights when sleep wouldn't come and the dark was as vast as my imagination—when I had to fill the void with everything I had ever done wrong.

I asked my mother if we could talk on the phone about our family's history. She asked me where I wanted to start.

“What are their names?” I asked.

I didn't know the proper names of any of my extended family. I had no reason to know them—we had never used them. To me, my relatives were just Gonggong, Yeye, Nainai, Popo, Dayi, Eryi, and so on. Most Chinese households were like this—you referred to people by their relation to you. You didn't even have to distinguish between this aunt or that aunt by name; you just called them First Aunt and Second Aunt, depending on seniority. Dayi, Eryi. Then Dayizhang and Eryizhang for their husbands, and so on. But this was so embarrassing. I couldn't look anyone up in a registry. I couldn't even find their obituaries.

My mother recited the names of everyone in her immediate family. I repeated each one as she said it, but they slid out of my mind as we went along. I asked her if she would text me a list so I could see which characters were involved, and she promised me she would.

I wanted to document everything about everyone. What year were they born? Where did they go to school? When did they start their first jobs?

When did they move to Guangzhou? I couldn't believe I had never bothered to ask about these things before. Did other people know these things about their grandparents? Was I the only one who'd been living in a fog?

My mother said she didn't know all the answers off the top of her head, but that she could send them to me later, if it mattered that much. “What else do you want to know?”

Everything. I didn't have the barest contours of the story, let alone a line of questioning. “We could start at the beginning, I guess. So Gonggong—has his family always been in Guangzhou?”

“Actually, no,” said my mother. “He grew up in Cambodia.”

“Cambodia?”

“Right, yes.”

“So he's actually Cambodian?”

“Yes—well, he's also Chinese. His family were overseas merchants from China living in Cambodia. There were a lot of overseas Chinese at that time. They went everywhere—Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, all over Southeast Asia.”

“So how did he end up back in China?”

“His parents sent him. They wanted him to contribute to his country. They sent him back for school, and they expected him to work for the government when he grew older.”

“Did a lot of Chinese people do that?”

“The overseas Chinese, yes. They were living in Cambodia, but their allegiance was to China. So when it seemed like China might become a modern republic—after the Qing dynasty was overthrown—they sent their eldest son back to help build a new nation. There were a lot of dreams at that time, you understand. He was fourteen.

They sent him to join the Nationalist youth corps, and then he was supposed to study law. It's very sad.”

I was still catching up to the thought of Gonggong at fourteen, crossing Southeast Asia so that he could help build a nation in a country he had never seen. At fourteen I was watching The Vampire Diaries and crying because my cute lab partner in A.P Chemistry didn't like me back. “What's very sad?”

“Because that meant he had to be far from home, and then after the Communist takeover, he never saw them again.”

“Why not?”

“Because of Pol Pot,” said my mother, like I was being dense. “Do you know about the Khmer Rouge?”

I understood this reference. I had learned about the Cambodian genocide in high school. I knew the vaguest details about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and the peasant revolutionaries who took scythes to the countryside. What I didn't understand was what this had to do with Gonggong.

“Wait.” I was still trying to follow the plot. “So you're saying—Gonggong's parents—they were targeted by the Khmer Rouge? They got genocided?”

“They were educated people, right? And the Khmer Rouge hated educated people.”

“Were they landlords?”

“Lily, they were Communists.” My mother snorted. “They weren't landlords. They weren't targeted on political grounds—there was no logic to it. The Khmer Rouge made everyone in their town pack up their belongings and go on a march—”

“A march to where?”

“Nowhere. I don't know. It doesn't matter—they were just marching, the marching was the whole point. And then your gonggong never heard from them again.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just mean he just couldn't get any more information.”

“So they died?”

“I suppose so.”

“What do you mean, you suppose so?”

I couldn't understand why she was being so vague about this. I felt I was asking rather basic questions, and that she was being recalcitrant to spite me, because who on earth merely supposed that their relatives might or might not have died?

“I don't know,” said my mother. “They must have. Because your gonggong never heard from them again.”

“Did he ever go back to Cambodia?”

“No, he couldn't. The borders were closed then, remember. It was very hard to get out.”

“Then how could he have made sure?”

“Lily.” My mother sounded exasperated. “How would he have made sure?”

“But how can we not know?”

I wanted confirmation. I wanted facts. I needed this story to make sense: the vagaries shaded in, the death dates certain, the bodies labeled and buried.

“Come on, Lily. It wasn't like a dinner reservation, okay? It wasn't like everyone had a spot in line, and we had everyone's phone numbers and dietary restrictions and credit card receipts and all that. There was no documentation. It just happened, and we've never seen them since, so we know they're dead.”

“I never heard about this.” The words came out more accusatory than I meant, though I did feel someone here was at fault for something. “You never talked to us about this.”

“Well.” My mother hummed. I couldn't read her tone. She seemed so distant—like we were strangers to each other—and I knew then that I had done something wrong, but I couldn't understand what it was. “It's not a very happy thing to talk about.”

Throughout the night, I curled on the couch in the dark and I posed my questions to the internet.

Why did the Khmer Rouge go after the Chinese?

Because the Chinese were wealthy migrants, city people, the wrong class, and they had stolen lands and riches from the native Khmer.

Was this true?

It was complicated. Then again, the Khmer Rouge went after the Chams, the Vietnamese, and the native Khmer as well. So it was difficult to argue that the Chinese had been ethnically singled out for destruction.

How many people died?

Up to three million people. We would never know for sure. The details were more qualitative than quantitative.

There were so many pictures. The piles of skulls, the killing fields, the mass graves. Photographs from the concentration camps. Dossiers stamped with red: political prisoners marked for execution.

I scrolled through pictures upon pictures until I was no longer processing what I was looking at. I couldn't get a grip on the idea that this had happened to my own family—that this chapter of history, which never made it onto any of my high school or college syllabi, was involved with me in any way.

I read on, trying to cram my mind with the details.

They killed 25 percent of the population. One in four people. They forced thousands into labor camps, concentration camps, and political prisons.

They killed people for defying the regime. They killed people for whispering discontent. They killed people for begging for food.

They killed people for falling ill. They killed people to make up their execution quotas. Sometimes they killed people for no reason at all; just the fun of it, because the blade was already moving, and it might as well find something to cut. And they would have kept going, might have never stopped, except that they crossed the border and massacred a village in Vietnam. They chased the villagers into pagodas and fired into the pagodas; then they chased the villagers into mountain caves, tracked them down with dogs, and threw grenades through the cave mouths.

The Vietnamese said no, quite enough of that, and invaded Cambodia, and installed a puppet government. And that was the only reason why the genocide ended.

What was the point? I wondered. Executing political enemies, that was one thing. But this wanton, senseless slaughter—what did that achieve? What were they trying to build?

I asked the internet: What was the purpose of the genocide?

The internet said: The Khmer Rouge was trying to transform the country into a classless agrarian utopia.

Why did that require killing a fourth of the population?

To rid the country of reactionary thought.

Why didn't the West do anything to help?

Because the West didn't know. Because the West wasn't looking. Because the leftists in the West, the only people who could have found Cambodia on a map, thought that the Khmer Rouge was carrying on a glorious revolution, and were cheering it on.

I looked up images of Cambodia today. Most of the search results were photographs of Phnom Penh, which looked like any other modern Asian city: busy markets, a finlike skyscraper, a temple lit up at night. Tourism promotions in oversaturated colors promised that Cambodia was very safe, and very lovely, to visit. Tipping was welcome but not required. Tickets to the killing fields museum cost six dollars. The best way to get around was by tuktuk.

I recalled vaguely that Cambodia was a Buddhist country, and that the Angkor Wat temple complex was one of the marvels of the ancient world. I looked up photos of Angkor Wat: yes, very grand indeed, so many temples like pine cones, so many Buddha faces cut into stone. I didn't know anything else about Cambodia. The only person I knew who'd ever been to Cambodia was Yuxiu, from class. In fact, the only impression I had was that it was a country where some villagers were so poor they needed Singaporean high schoolers to build them houses, and where you had to dance across a field of bricks to shit.

The next day, I didn't leave the building at lunchtime. I was worried about the air raid drill. We had received an email reminder from the program office earlier that morning that read:

Chinese text1:30 to 2 30 Chinese text 1 30 Chinese text I.C.L.P.

The annual Wan An air raid drill will be held from 1:30 to 2 30 PM today. If you have classes in the afternoon, please return to the department before 1:30.

Chinese text.

Sirens will sound at the beginning of the drill. If you are outdoors at that time, please follow guidance by the police to find shelter nearby.

I didn't know where the nearest shelter was, and I didn't want to be caught out slurping noodles when the time came, so I'd elected to just stay in the building. I had no evidence for this, but I imagined that the public shelters were like London's bomb shelters during World War 2: dark, bricked-up places without toilets. When the drill happened, I wanted access to a toilet.

I kept watching the clock. One twenty-nine. One thirty. The email didn't explain further about the logistics of the drill, but I thought surely an air raid must involve an ear-splitting alarm. But I heard nothing, just the same muffled voices through the doors; rustling pages; pens scratching, laboriously copying out characters.

Minutes trickled by. Still nothing happened. I considered going out for lunch, but I was afraid the air raid could still occur at any point throughout the hour. What if the timing wasn't precise—what if the 1:30 mark was just the start of the window?

I stood up to peer outside. Students were walking up and down the street just as they would on a normal day. The air was silent.

I felt insane. This was just like the morning of the earthquake—no one registered anything but me.

Was I the idiot for making such a fuss? Perhaps this was my American naivete showing through again—perhaps I, who had never lived under fear of invasion, was panicking over a threat that none of the locals took seriously. But I looked up the drill on the internet, and it seemed this was quite a serious thing. The threat of a Chinese invasion was always looming.

Defense ministers were always announcing the newest likely dates of the invasion, shifting it back from 2025 to 2027 when it didn't happen, but always within the next three to four years; military exercises escalating near the coasts; news reports of navy tankers and mounted machine guns. This was real. Taiwan was preparing for something.

I thought about the things we thought were normal in America: fire drills, tornado drills, school shooter drills. Shooter drills were the worst, since the advice kept changing. First it was to hide out of sight of the windows.

Then it was to barricade the doors. Then it was to escape out the windows. Now it was “run, hide, and fight.” But nothing we did in America approximated preparing for a total war—for the occupation and devastation of our homeland.

“Lily!” It was Teacher Sun; her classroom was just past the computer lab. “Why aren't you at lunch?”

“I thought there would be an air raid drill,” I said. “I didn't want to be caught outside.”

“A what?”

I glanced down at the email, just to make sure I had pronounced it correctly. “The air raid drill?”

“The air raid drill!” Teacher Sun laughed. “Was that today?”

“Yes, they sent out an announcement.”

“Oh, don't worry about that!”

She walked off before I could ask her what she meant. I blinked at my screen. I was so woozy from hunger that the characters swam like squiggles before me, unintelligible. I still didn't know whether I was allowed to leave the building. The longer I was here, the less I understood about anything at all.

Skipper approached me in the hallway and said, “I heard your grandfather passed away.”

“Oh.” I hadn't spoken to Skipper since before I left for Beitou. “Yes. He did.”

“I am very sorry for your loss.”

He used the same condolence phrase I had learned from Teacher Sun. I was impressed. I had never carried out a full conversation in Chinese with Skipper before. But Tingting was right—his Chinese was very good.

“Were there strippers at the funeral?” Skipper asked.

“What?”

Skipper explained that he had learned from Tingting that sometimes the Taiwanese liked to employ strippers at their funerals—literally, half-naked girls gyrating on top of cars. The point was to attract a big crowd, because sometimes it mattered for Buddhists that a big, raucous crowd see the dead off to the underworld. Chinese text was the phrase that Skipper used: hot and noisy.

“I don't think it was that sort of funeral.” I was trying to decide whether to be offended. “And I don't think my gonggong would have approved of strippers.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Skipper rubbed at the back of his neck. “Sorry, I guess I was just trying to be funny.”

I felt a sharp pressure behind my eyes. I hugged him before I started crying. Skipper stood stiff in my arms for a moment, and then he lifted one hand and patted me on the back.

For Modern Taiwanese Literature, I had to write a five-hundred-character essay on an experience I'd had with suicide. Of course, I didn't have to write about my own suicide. Friends or family or even fictional accounts were okay.

Suicidal ideation or attempts were also okay—no one needed to have actually died. We just had to practice using the following phrases:

- Chinese text: suicide

- Chinese text: to seek a short-term solution; euphemistically, commit suicide

- Chinese text: gloomy, in low spirits

Fortunately, I had plenty of material to work with. Over fifteen minutes, with much help from the dictionary, I typed: “My older sister, Jasmine, was once gloomy and in low spirits, and she tried to seek a short-term solution by ending her own life. Fortunately, she was not successful.”

For the term “successful,” I used Chinese text: the same phrase I would use in the context of getting good grades or meeting a self-help goal, so that when translated back, the sentence read more like “She did not achieve her ambitions of killing herself.” I wasn't sure if this was appropriate, but I didn't know a better phrase.

It had happened several years ago, during what our family now referred to as Jasmine's “difficult phase.” We used the word “difficult” because neither of my parents had the words or even the conceptual framework for “clinical depression.” It all began when my parents realized that it was past midnight, that the family car was missing, and that no one had heard from Jasmine for hours. My mother and father spoke to some of Jasmine's friends, and the story emerged in bits and pieces. Jasmine had been threatening to kill herself.

Jasmine had left a note with someone, somewhere, though this person was now unreachable, and no one remembered what the note said. Allegedly there were screenshots of incriminating conversations, but we couldn't see them. Jasmine had asked a friend to procure sleeping pills for her, and though no one did so, they hadn't thought to warn my parents that Jasmine had made this request.

I had always hated Jasmine's friends: surly, greasy-haired teenagers in dark and baggy clothes, whose lips curled when they saw me, who laughed when I asked if they were in Jasmine's homeroom class. They were not helpful—if anything, they seemed resentful that we were harshing Jasmine's vibe, that the least we could give her was the freedom to die.

We searched Jasmine's room, but she had been careful. Her browser history was wiped clean. Nothing in her drawers.

A few empty plastic baggies, wads of cash, but what did that mean? We found only one incriminating item: an empty handle of vodka, tucked indifferently behind the trash can. I remembered that bottle vividly, because it was the first time I understood an object to be vodka, which until then was a concept I had encountered only in doh-stoy-ev-ski novels. Jasmine had finished a handle of Burnett's Hot Cinnamon vodka. I understood this was a symbol of vice, and the first time I saw that cheap red-and-white label at a college party, vomit crept up in my throat.

I remembered huddling with Flora around the kitchen table, knees drawn up, arms wrapped over our shins while our father shouted at Jasmine's friends over the phone. Where did you see her? When was this? Why didn't you tell us? When he wasn't on the phone, he was ranting, slamming his palms against the walls.

The police came to our door. At first they thought our mother had called in a domestic violence complaint against our father because she was crying and he was shouting, and they tried to arrest my father, but Flora and I ran in shouting our protests in English, and even when everyone had calmed down, they were unsympathetic. Was Jasmine a minor? No, eighteen? Then they couldn't do anything. Adults who lived at home were still adults; they had the right not to be found. What about the car?

Had Jasmine stolen the car? Yes, they could report the vehicle as stolen, but that was not so urgent as to warrant a house call. They agreed to help only after our father told them that Jasmine was suicidal.

I guessed premeditated murder was still a crime even if the victim was the perpetrator.

Gonggong and Popo were in the house. They had come for our winter break, because we hadn't been to China that summer and my mother missed her parents. It was a tense visit.

Flora and I were entering middle school and high school respectively, and we were grappling with the life-or-death stakes of those milieus. We did not have time to babysit our grandparents. Jasmine had decided against college; she was still living at home, but she was never around.

I only ever saw her sneaking in late at night and then leaving first thing in the morning.

Our language was rusty, and we didn't know what to do with these grandparents, who seemed so much older and slower than we remembered them. My mother urged us to spend time with them, but we didn't know how. We didn't need them to take care of us anymore, but we didn't know what to do with them otherwise.

Every exchange was tinged with guilt: We had to pretend we wouldn't prefer they weren't there. We settled on walking the dog together. Flora and I spoke the best Chinese we had. Look, a duck! Look, a squirrel! Look, another duck!

I was always startled to hear Flora speak Chinese, because by then she had spent so much time with her gaggle of Bratz doll white friends that I was shocked she understood any Chinese at all. She refused to speak it at home; she always answered our parents back in English. But with our grandparents, Flora intoned Chinese with all the saccharine sweetness of a C-drama heroine. Gonggong, Popo, would you do me the honor of holding Jack-Jack's leash?

I remember their patient smiles, their vigorous strides. Popo swung her arms up and down in imitation of the army march she'd learned at school. “Keeps the blood circulating through the muscles,” she told us. “Circulation is important at my age. Go on, you try.” We obeyed. We understood perfectly well whenever she spoke to us. We just couldn't give an interesting response.

We were polite. We excused ourselves at dinner, and then we fled upstairs. Flora liked doing her homework at the dining room table, but now she did it shut up in her room.

Otherwise Gonggong would hover over her shoulder, curious about how they taught algebra in America. What was this new math? Why was she drawing boxes? “Tell him to stop,” Flora complained to our mother, as if Gonggong weren't even there. “I can't concentrate, he's so annoying.”

The only group activity we enjoyed was watching movies. One night we all sat together to watch The Godfather. Gonggong had picked it out. He recognized the cover; that imported bootleg D.V.D had made it all over China. At first Gonggong had sat there watching by himself, but the score and dialogue were impossible to resist, and by the time Connie's wedding was over, all of us were sitting in rapt attention, waiting to see how Michael might save his father from being assassinated at the hospital. There were no subtitles; I couldn't tell how well my grandparents were following the plot. Sometimes my mother leaned over to explain things such as “The older brother is too hotheaded and that's why they had to kill him,” or “Now control of the family goes to the younger one.”

“It's hard to be the head of the family,” Gonggong had observed, while my father nodded in agreement. “So many people depend on you.”

The police called around two in the morning. Someone had identified a car similar to ours by the lake. Our parents and the officers at the house all sped out to go investigate. Flora and I wanted to go too, but my mother refused to let us. “Watch them,” she said as she was gathering up her things, though it wasn't clear whom she was speaking to.

Somehow we ended up sitting on the stairs right in front of the front door, just sitting and waiting, hugging our knees to our chest. I remembered staring at the bottom of the stairs, tracing lines in the patterns in the wood. How could this be my reality? How could I be in this moment, right now; how had things culminated in this? Back then, I already harbored fantasies that I could prove any bad situation was an illusion. Maybe if I concentrated on the precise grain of the wood I would find a flaw and expose the dream and wake up.

“Why is it always our family?” Flora demanded. “Other families have normal people, why do we get stuck with fucking Jasmine, what's her problem even, why is she always doing this? What does she have to be sad about?”

We bitched about Jasmine for a while. Jasmine was selfish and narcissistic, Jasmine didn't care about any of us, she made our parents miserable, her piercings looked awful, the one in her nose made her look like a cow, and if she meant to kill herself then she should have done it a long time ago and saved everyone all this trouble.

“Don't say that,” said Gonggong. “Don't talk that way about your sister.”

We were startled to hear him speak. Until that moment we had been acting like he wasn't even there. Flora and I were in our own little world, and Gonggong and Popo were in theirs. I realized, in revisiting this memory, that perhaps my perception of Gonggong had been wrong all along. Had I imagined that he couldn't speak a word of English? How else would he have known what we were saying?

“Your sister is a good girl,” he told us, in Chinese. “She loves you all very much. And she is going to come home.”

“How do you know?” asked Flora, also in Chinese.

“Because I know your sister,” he said. “She's going through a hard time. It's hard to grow up in this country.”

He spoke with such quiet authority. Gonggong never spoke with authority to us; he always deferred discipline to our parents. Gonggong was only ever gentle and accommodating with us; if we put up with him, then he enjoyed our time; if we wanted to run off, he didn't mind.

He never complained about anything we did. But he, too, had raised three daughters, in far harsher conditions than these. He knew how to be a rock.

“Don't worry,” said Gonggong. He put his hands on both of our shoulders. “I know Jasmine. I know she doesn't want to die.”

Flora began to cry, and so I began to cry too.

We might have spoken more, but I had only hazy memories of the rest of that night. What I remembered: the post at the bottom of the stairs, the fraying edge of our rug. Jack-Jack gnawing passionately at a chew toy. And Gonggong, silent and solid, holding me and Flora against him until the police lights flashed outside our front door, and a tumble of voices spilled through the hallway, and Jasmine was delivered safely home.

My mother didn't understand why I wanted to keep talking about Cambodia.

“This again,” she said whenever I asked. “What else is there to know?”

What else? She'd hardly given me a story. How, precisely, had this all gone down? Had Gonggong ever confirmed that his parents were dead? Had anyone in the family survived?

“Well of course, his sister—”

“His sister?”

“Yes, California Grandma.”

“Oh!” There was a woman in Los Angeles that we had only ever known as California Grandma, though her actual relationship to our family had never been clear to me. We understood that she was an older female relative of some kind, and that my mother had lived with her from high school onward. We had met her on many occasions: I associated her with childhood road trips to L.A, with dingy Vietnamese grocery stores and grainy taro milk tea and simmering pots of bone broth. California Grandma was just a fact of life—another thread I'd never bothered to pick up.

“So California Grandma was your aunt?”

“Yes, Gonggong's sister. So your great-aunt. She sent him a letter when she got to a refugee camp in Thailand and told him that their parents had died, and her twin sons had died, and her husband had died. She was the only one who made it out.”

“What happened to her sons?”

“I don't know.” My mother paused. “Maybe they got sick. I hope—well, I just don't know.”

I had a better idea now of how all this had gone down. I had read some academic articles. I had learned that the Khmer Rouge rounded up everyone living in cities and called them the New People—the people who weren't pure peasants, who needed to be culled for the revolution.

I had discovered a dozen ways my great-grandparents and my uncles could have died. Maybe they refused to leave their home; maybe they were shot on the doorstep. Maybe they got ill.

Maybe they drowned in rice paddies, too weak to keep moving. Maybe they were clubbed to death for asking for food, or walking too slow, or making the wrong expression. And I saw that my question was indeed pointless, because the question wasn't how they had died; it was how anyone could have survived that death march to begin with.

“Wait.” The thought had just occurred to me. The Cambodian genocide began in the mid-seventies. This was recent history. This wasn't distant the way World War 2 felt distant.

This was only one generation away—this was living memory. The Beatles had broken up before the Khmer Rouge started the massacres. “You would have been born by then. You would have met them, right?”

“I didn't meet them,” said my mother. “I was too young. My sisters met them. Your eryi remembers our grandma very well.

She remembered that she wore such nice dresses. She was—how do you say it? A dainty woman. She was small and elegant and pretty.

We had a photograph of her, and Eryi liked to show it to me all the time. This made me so jealous—that she had met Grandma, and I hadn't.”

“Do you still have that photograph?”

“Oh, no—I'm sure it's lost now.” A pause. “I remember how she was standing, though. Turned to the side, one hand on her hip. We used to imitate her pose all the time.”

“Did you ever ask what happened to them? Your grandparents?”

“Of course,” said my mother. “All the time. I couldn't understand why I couldn't meet them. No one would explain. When I was little, I used to sit outside and watch the planes flying across the sky, and I would think to myself, maybe that's Grandma and Grandpa coming to visit.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Wow.”

“Yes, but of course, they were never coming. So that was a silly thing to think.”

“Wait, then, California Grandma. So she . . . so she made it to the U.S? Alone?”

“Yes. Oh—I forgot to tell you. Well, so you know how I went to California to finish high school?”

“Yes?” I had never asked about the circumstances of this either. I had just assumed my mother wanted to study abroad.

“Well, so, after my aunt had been living on her own for a few years, my father told her that he had three daughters, meaning he had extras, and she could have one. She lost her boys, remember.”

“So they sent you? As a replacement?”

“Yes.”

We were both silent for a while.

“Jesus,” I said. “Mom. I'm so sorry.”

“Why are you sorry? I was excited. I was so happy when Gonggong told me. I couldn't wait to get out of China.”

“Why didn't you ever tell us about this?”

“You never asked.”

“I was supposed to ask about why you were sent to replace your aunt's dead sons?”

“Well, yes. I would have told you if you had asked. But you never asked.”

She said this in a matter-of-fact tone. I knew she wasn't saying it to hurt me, but still it stung. I had been planning to ask. I had promised to undertake this project ever since I began to learn Chinese. I would interview my grandparents, and I would understand where I came from, and I would have a full historical record of everything they had gone through. But California Grandma had passed away years ago.

Gonggong was dead. Popo could barely speak; Popo didn't even know who I was. All my connections to that generation were severed, and all I had now were stories from my mother, and she seemed disinclined to confirm more than the vaguest details.

“Lily, is everything okay?”

“Yeah.” I sniffled. “I just—I just really want to know more. I feel like there's all this history that we've lost.”

“Then you can read a history book, can't you? Don't be sad.” She must have heard me crying over the line. “Things just happen this way, right? I left the island.

Your dad left the village. Your gonggong left Cambodia. This is just what people do; they live their lives, and when circumstances change, they go off to find somewhere better, all right? What's there to be sad about?”

“Mom, am I bothering you?”

“No.” A pause. “Why?”

“I'm just really trying to find out what happened to our family, but it seems like you don't want to answer anything. Like all these questions are just annoying to you.”

A longer pause. Then: “I'm sorry. It's not annoying. I just—it's not a happy thing to talk about, you understand?”

I didn't know what to say. I had always imagined my parents would be pleased at my attempts to reconnect—that they had been waiting all these years for any one of their children to take an interest in our culture and our past. I thought that my studying Chinese was closing the circle. I thought I'd be rewarded for caring.

“I just feel like it's important. Knowing what they've been through.”

“You never wanted to know before.”

“I was being stupid before.” I was crying again. I tried to quash it down, since I knew this would only irritate her further, but I just couldn't stop. “But I really want to know now, Mom, I want to know where I came from.”

“But you see . . .” My mother began a word, and then broke it off, then made a sound that wasn't a word at all. “But you didn't come from that. It doesn't have anything to do with you.”

In the sixth grade, my friend Erin Pritzker invited me to her grandfather's eightieth birthday party at the Fairmont hotel downtown. It would be a huge event, she told me; over a hundred relatives were flying in. I had never been to a party at a hotel ballroom. My mother made me wear my piano recital dress with silver-buckled black leather shoes, and I whined about this until Erin's mom came to pick me up and I saw Erin was dressed the same way.

We were assigned to seats for dinner: Erin found her table number on a big board listing everyone's names, and when we got there we found little name cards in front of every folded napkin: Erin Pritzker, Erin Pritzker Guest. There was a big buffet table, with large silver trays of foods that seemed in no way culturally linked, such as macaroni and cheese, samosas, and chicken piccata.

I kept seeing girls, young women, and older women who looked exactly how I imagined Erin might in five, ten, fifteen years. The same brown-blond hair, the same green eyes, the same pert nose. I was astonished when Erin told me she didn't know their names.

She would say things like I think that's Audrey? I think those are the cousins from Maryland? And not everyone knew who Erin was either. Several times people asked who I was, and when I said I was here with Erin, they looked confused, until someone told them, Jenna's girl, the Pritzkers, and then they would say to Erin, Oh yes, how are you, how is your mother?

Imagine having so much family that you didn't know who they were! I had only two cousins, and they both lived in Guangzhou. I told this to Erin, who asked, why didn't they have more kids? I had just learned about the one-child policy in school, and I was confident this had something to do with it. I explained: When the Communists took over, China didn't have enough food to go around, so they put a limit on how many children people could have, and no one wanted girls, so people were aborting or abandoning baby girls until they gave birth to boys. “Wow,” said Erin. “So your parents would have left you in a field.” I said that I thought my parents were more progressive than that, but yes—perhaps so.

A toddler waddled around the ballroom and people cooed wherever it went. People kept picking it up and letting it sit on their laps. I watched for a while, but I couldn't make out who its parents were. Was this safe? How could you drop a baby in the middle of a hundred people and trust that not a single one of them meant it harm?

Lots of people told us to work hard in school, and to not get too distracted by the boys. Lots of people came up with open arms and shouted, “Hello, you!” The first time this happened I watched and wondered, why was Erin hugging this man? Why was she telling him about school, what did he care? Erin didn't know herself.

An uncle, maybe? A first cousin? What an interesting concept this was!

Intimacy with people you couldn't pick out of a crowd, intimacy as assumed goodwill, intimacy as obligation, even with people you might never see again.

Erin's grandmother gave me a silver hair clip and said I looked very pretty. The nice blond women who looked like older versions of Erin kept asking if I had had enough to eat, and when the ice cream sundae station was set out, they made sure I got to the front of the line. I wished I had aunts in this country. I had never been so coddled in my life.

When my mother picked me up I asked if we could make Gonggong and Popo come back to America and throw them a party at the Fairmont too, and only now did I understand what she'd meant when she'd said that no one would come.

While I was waiting for the bus home, I received a long text from Anna.

She was coming back to the apartment. She couldn't keep imposing on Margrit's space; she didn't think that was fair. However, given how uncomfortable we were around each other, she thought it best if we could try avoiding the apartment when the other was present.

She was studying at home this afternoon; she had an oral presentation tomorrow and she really needed to focus, so could I find somewhere else to be until bedtime? Ten o'clock, at least.

I considered fighting back. Anna's proposal was slightly more reasonable than evicting me, but still she could not possibly ask me to stay out on a day when temperatures exceeded one hundred degrees. But then I thought about that dimly lit room, and the empty box of tissues on the coffee table, and the bedpost I had clung to, sobbing, every afternoon this week. Then I stepped onto the first bus that arrived and settled in to see where it would take me.

Without the apartment to anchor me, I realized I had free run of this city: I could go anywhere or see anything, and no one would stop me. Until now I had kept to such strict circuits: home, then class, then home, then class. But that was ridiculous. I had total freedom—why was I acting like I had a curfew?

I got off the bus at Liberty Square, the park complex that housed the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. I had it in my head that I wanted a full blast of nationalist propaganda—to see if I could feel some affective response to this idea of a Chinese republic that my grandfather had left Cambodia for.

I was the only person in the square. It was a weekday afternoon, when all the locals would still be at school or work, and it seemed the heat had driven away the tourists. The skies were clear, brutally bright, and the light shone so intensely off the white pavement that I couldn't keep my eyes open.

I could only squint at the ground. This was the smallest my shadow had ever been. It was so neatly tucked under my shoes, I could almost pretend it had vanished.

Halfway up the steps, I felt a hit of vertigo. I had not eaten anything that day. In fact, I had not been eating very much that week. I hadn't meant to fast. Grief blocked up the stomach; I had been too nauseous to eat. But I had discovered that when I went hours without eating I achieved a certain lightness, and that lightness felt good.

I wasn't trying to die or anything, but I did like this feeling of becoming less substantial. The closer I became to air, the less I would feel.

But now the heat beat against my back, and I felt black pressing in at the edges of my vision. My knees buckled. I realized I might be in trouble.

I needed shade, and then food. The nearest locations where I could acquire either of these things were the National Theater and the National Concert Hall, twin buildings that faced each other at the opposite end of the square. They were built in that classical, ornamental Chinese style: sloping pagoda roofs with burnt-orange tiles, and gaudy red columns lining the sides.

I'd never been inside either. The last time we had come here, soldiers in full dress had been practicing marching drills by the doors, and we had been too intimidated to approach.

The theater looked closed, but the doors to the concert hall were propped open. I walked inside and found myself in a packed lobby—there were at least a hundred people milling around. A few, like me, were dressed like they had just stumbled in after class.

But most of the crowd were dressed formally: floor-length dresses, dark jackets over trousers. A grand piano stood in the center of the lobby, where people were lining up to take photographs.

Where had all these people come from? The square had seemed deserted—I hadn't seen anyone walking in or out. I saw dozens of people in long sleeves, but there wasn't a drop of sweat on their foreheads, and I found it hard to believe they could have trekked here from outside like I had. Was there a network of underground tunnels I did not know about?

This was so incongruous with the blinding solitude of the square. I felt as if I had stepped out of one film and into another—the genres had switched on me. But it was cool inside, and nobody seemed bothered by my presence. I stood by the center staircase and rested my forearms against the wooden banister, letting the hubbub of voices wash over me.

“Do you have a ticket?”

I glanced up. A young woman in a black suit stood before me, a ticket scanner in hand.

“Oh—no, sorry.”

She looked me up and down. I was trying to remember how to explain I was just looking around the lobby, but then she asked, “Are you a student?”

“Um—yes?”

“We have some complimentary tickets reserved for students.” She handed me a program. “Today's program features Liszt's poetic and religious harmonies. If you have proof of identity, I can give you a student ticket.”

I pulled out my NTU card. She glanced down, nodded in approval, and waved me through. Then I was following the crowd along the velvet ropes toward the hall. Well, why not? I had no great passion for classical music, nor any particular knowledge about Liszt. I just wanted to be a part of the crowd, to experience whatever they were experiencing. If they were so excited about it, then it must be something worth seeing.

I found a seat near the front and flipped open my program. It was in Chinese, but I was startled by how much of it was immediately comprehensible to me. I wasn't struggling to read. The pianist was from Israel, and he was a big deal: He had performed at concert halls throughout Europe and the Americas and been a soloist with all sorts of philharmonic orchestras. This was his first time in Taiwan. The National Concert Hall was honored to host him.

I thought there would be more pomp and circumstance when the concert began, but no one gave a speech or anything. The stage lights came on, and the audience fell silent. Out came the pianist, a dour-faced man who did not so much as crack a smile as we applauded. He gave a short bow, sat down, and touched the keys. A tremor came over his shoulders; then he hunched over and began a series of slow, gentle broken chords. I checked my program: Liszt's Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude.

The woman in the row behind me kept murmuring to her companion, in English, that she wished they had sat farther back. “Up close is no good,” she hissed. “It's like you're watching a recital in your living room.” But I liked being up close. I liked seeing the pianist's hands, and the white of his shirtsleeves poking through the dark of his jacket. He reminded me of a chef. What was it they said? Good chefs had clean sleeves?

I liked the way he jerked one hand or the other up in the air every time he finished a trill, as if getting it clear of the musical soup. Like the keyboard was a wash of ingredients and here he was, stirring it around, never letting it splash.

The concert hall was dark, deliciously cool. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. I felt that hit of vertigo again. For a moment I was afraid that my hunger had caught up with me, and that I would faint in my seat. But then a marvelous thing happened.

The lightness intensified, but I did not lose consciousness. Rather, my body, or my perception of my body, melted away entirely, until all that existed was the sound. A tension released from my head. I was free from this struggle to make myself and the world articulable.

I did not have to say anything or interpret anything. As I sat there in the dark, I felt the core of myself, that part that was capable of conscious reflection, drift outside of my body and toward the stage, riding the notes and going wherever they took me.

How did music paint an image in your head? I wondered. How could it be that certain combinations of notes struck the same emotions in different listeners? In my freshman Introduction to Philosophy class, we had learned how sho-pen-how-ur argued that music was the highest of all the arts, because it did not try to represent any ideas from the material world.

Painting and sculpture and poetry were mere shadows of reality, just approximations of ideas, but music was pre-language, pre-association. Only music captured the Will.

But that could not be quite right, because I could see so clearly in my mind's eye the narrative of this piece. Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude—the blessing of God, received in solitude. I did not compose this image from thin air; I saw what the notes told me to see. I saw the lonely man praying on his knees, whispering in silence, Oh, God. Saw his lips moving; saw his head bowed in the dark, his eyes squeezed shut and brow furrowed. Saw the sun coming up, the light streaming through stained glass, and the glow rising around him. Then the chords crescendoed, and the angels joined in his song, and I saw that man lifting his face, rising up on his knees, because his prayers had worked, and someone was listening after all, and the heavens were answering his call.

N.T.U E-PROOF—not FOR SALE

HarperCollinsPublishers

....................................

6

On Monday, I made a bargain with myself.

I split myself into three temporal identities. This was the best way to understand my current state of mind. One version of me existed before receiving my mother's text, who was perhaps not having the most wonderful time in Taipei but was getting by. Then, right now, there was a stricken mind and a body that had to be dealt with, cleaned and fed and put in the right places at the right times. And then, several months or maybe a year from now, there hopefully existed a version of me who wasn't crying all the time.

She would be very glad to have had all these cultural experiences, and disappointed if she'd squandered her summer abroad. So if it made no difference to me now, I might as well create some good memories for that future self.

This temporal bargain also worked in the short term. If I put myself in a public place, then the chances improved that I would do the things to comport with that place. You couldn't just lie down and cry in a café, for example. You had to minimally keep it together. And you couldn't have a breakdown at the National Concert Hall, or spend class in a depressed fugue, and so on. So if I mustered the willpower to get out there now, then I might be rewarded in the future.

In the Zhuangzi there was a story about a monkey keeper who promised his monkeys that they could have four peaches for dinner if they could get by on just three peaches for breakfast. Then of course at dinnertime, he gave them only three peaches but promised four peaches for breakfast the next morning, and so on and so on. The monkeys never wised up. The chengyu based on this fable was Chinese text: three in the morning, four in the afternoon. It was used to describe someone facetious and unreliable, someone who was always changing the story.

But I was deceiving myself here, and I didn't think it was so nefarious. The monkey keeper wasn't trying to starve his monkeys, he was just trying to give them some hope. You could delude yourself into believing lots of things if you trusted that eventually life would get better.

Of course, when the time came I never wanted to go.

Every morning, I ran through the same mental dialectic while the clock ticked closer to nine. Getting up, simply constituting myself as a subject involved such strain, and what if we shattered into a million pieces on the bus, what if we dissolved into a puddle at the department, what if today was the day that Teacher Cai pointed at me and asked a question and my skull cracked trying to answer?

But if I did not go, there would be no structure to the day. Then I would have nothing to do, and no choice but to lie facedown in bed, sapped of the willpower to move. Anything worth doing would lose its prospects as the day went by, until finally it was nine in the evening and still I would not have moved, and then I would not be able to sleep because I had already slept all day. And then I would be alone, in the dark, thinking of the killing fields.

I sought out places where I could be a part of a crowd. I wanted to be around Taiwanese people, but I was embarrassed that in all this time I had not formed a relationship with a single Taiwanese person except my teachers, who were paid to spend time with me. Somehow I'd been even worse at this than Skipper. I could blame this on the structure of the program: My department was full of foreigners, and outside of class time there were not many organic opportunities to make friends. Anyhow, it seemed unethical to force a friendship on the locals, to demand that they contribute to my experience abroad.

Meanwhile there were so many shared, public tableaus I could join. I gravitated toward concerts, films, cafés, and crowds. I had stopped reading reviews on Google Maps. Every day I would get on a different bus and keep riding until I noticed a lot of people were getting off, and then I would follow this critical mass to wherever they were going next.

I wandered around industrial parks and shopping plazas. I walked through residential districts. I loved cafés most of all. You didn't have to pay much to go into a café, and you could stay there for as long as you liked, listening to the conversations floating in the air.

I tried not to form a routine circuit. I sought out a new café every afternoon, just to be around people who were working and talking. I went to a bubble tea café on the top floor of a bookstore near campus where every drink came with cheese foam by default. Where had this Asian obsession with cheese come from?

You had to specifically request its removal if you didn't want cheese foam. I went to Tò-uat Books, where the letters on the window read: “Resist China / Freedom NOW / #Freetibet / #Standwithhk / #Saveuyghur / #STANDWITHUKRAINE,” and a blue banner indoors read, “Hong Kong is not China,” and the low door in front of the coffee kiosk was draped with a Pride flag. Such purpose! I wanted to linger inside, but there was some kind of book club going on, and everyone looked so serious that I was scared off.

I went several times to Editor Books & Café, which was a short bike ride south of campus. Like so many Taipei cafés, Editor Café was designed in imitation of some European aesthetic, but it refused to settle on just one. Soft-light banker lamps sat at each table, with jade-green lampshades and gleaming brass necks. Mozart played gently from the speakers.

There was a large selection of translated foreign titles, mostly by philosophers I had never read. The menu offered an eclectic selection: Here one could order a Sicilian coffee, a Swedish fisksoppa, or a classic bolognese. I ordered the beef tomato curry, which was brought to me on a wooden tray with the sort of domed metal top I'd seen only in films set in hotels. My curry hadn't been microwaved long enough; the beef chunks were still frozen on the inside, but I didn't mind.

The vibes were too good. A pretty girl with two long, swinging braids took the table across from me, and I watched her pull out an Advanced English Through Literature textbook. I was making flash cards from my Modern Taiwanese Literature textbook. She caught my eye, and we both smiled.

A group of six adults came in once while I was studying. I watched them for a while, trying to determine their relationship to one another. It wasn't obvious.

They all seemed to know at least one other person present, but not everyone knew everyone in the group. They kept making introductions. Here was an old friend from college.

Here was a colleague at the department. They kept hugging. I liked their way of speaking. They seemed so patient, so gentle with one another.

They ordered lunch—three butter chicken curries and two beef tomato stews—and when everyone's tray had arrived, they linked hands, bowed their heads, and prayed.

In the evenings, I kept going back to the National Concert Hall. I could always get discounted student tickets, and there was always something going on, every night of the week.

The audience was not always as well behaved as they had been for the Israeli pianist. That had been a special occasion, it turned out. I rarely saw foreigners in the concert hall after that. Never again did I see a full house.

Most of the time, only a quarter of the seats were occupied. When local musicians played, people showed up in tank tops and shorts. At a string quartet performance by four Taiwanese sisters, the old woman behind me sat cracking peanut shells between her teeth the entire time.

Once during a performance by the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, a cell phone went off between movements and kept ringing for an unreasonably long interval. The audience rustled. A few people laughed. The conductor—an esteemed guest conductor visiting from Germany—turned around and threw up his arms, and his eyes flashed a look that said, These people.

It was strange that I should adore classical music now, when as a child I had thrown so many tantrums over being forced to practice the violin that finally my mother let me quit.

One night I strolled into the concert hall on a whim without reading the program description. There was a full orchestra onstage, but all the performers were unexpectedly young—at least two of them could have been in middle school. The conductor explained to us that this was the summer recital of Taiwan's youth orchestra.

He'd founded this youth orchestra in his home city of Taoyuan to create more career and development opportunities for young artists. The musicians we were hearing tonight, all under eighteen, had made it through several rounds of regional, then national auditions. They were the best of the best.

I felt a small burn of resentment, though I had not touched an instrument in years. This reaction was ingrained, instinctive. Any well-behaved Chinese child was a threat.

I couldn't take my eyes off the first violin—a tall, long-limbed boy in a black suit that was much too short in the arms. His hair was slicked back so neatly, except for a single strand that kept falling over his eyes. He played with his whole body.

His eyes fluttered closed whenever the music swelled, and he swooned this way and that, dancing in his seat. Back home he would have been named something like Kevin or Jonathan. He probably would have played during worship at church, and all the parents would have fawned over him, and I would have had a confused crush on him, and all the college admissions officers would have rolled their eyes as they wrote off another Asian applicant whose extracurricular was orchestra. Back home he would have been a stereotype; here, he was just a kid who loved his violin.

I wondered if I would have stuck with the violin if I'd grown up in Taipei, and I imagined myself for a moment as one of the girls onstage beside him. Shiny black hair braided down my back. Shiny black dress; shiny black shoes, toes tapping to the beat.

Every time I left the concert hall, I pondered why I had come all this way just to listen to music from Western Europe. I felt a little guilty spending my fellowship funds on concert tickets, since technically we were only supposed to spend money on “Taiwanese cultural enrichment activities,” and listening to classical music by European composers was in no way a Taiwanese cultural enrichment activity, unless you considered the fact that many of the musicians and audience were Taiwanese, so didn't whatever they participated in count as a Taiwanese activity?

Anyhow, I'd given up on the project of authentic connection. Taiwan had as little to do with me as Franz Liszt did. My family was not from here. I was in fact the first person in my family to visit Taipei; my mother was the second.

Gonggong had never set foot on this island. He very well could have; that branch path did exist. If he had stuck with the Nationalists, if he had fled here in 1949 with all the other soldiers and their families, then I might have grown up visiting relatives in a high-rise in Taoyuan who took me to hotel restaurants where sesame buns looked like pears.

But this was not how things had gone, and any nostalgia this place induced in me was for a past in the subjunctive: maybe, should have, if only.

This rupture was very freeing. It absolved anything I saw from the burden of significance. I was not homecoming and I was not a tourist. I was just a student, and I was living in a city among two and a half million other people, many of whom loved Liszt, just like me, and we were all calling this place home, for now.

I was getting practiced at picking the American summer transplants out of a crowd. They were the grumpiest and sweatiest, and the older they were, the more unhappy they looked. The boys whined as they trailed behind their parents, complaining that their data service was not fast enough, and the girls sat sullen, arms folded tight across their stomachs, picking at their food.

I sympathized. My mother had taken me on a trip to Shanghai the summer after I started high school, a stinking hot trip that was comprised largely of waiting in lines while standing in the shade, cooling myself with a souvenir battery-powered fan. I had spent most of it shutting out the world with my Skullcandy headphones, staring out bus windows, counting down the hours until our flight home.

Twelve through sixteen were the worst ages to come back to China; the worst ages, period. Your boobs were coming in, but so was the rest of your body fat. Nothing fit right.

Your skin was greasy, painful, and red; you tried every product at the drugstore, but none of it worked. You had to buy new clothes every few months, but no matter how often you sized up your jeans, you kept squeezing out the sides. It was too hot, too humid, and you were too grumpy to face your relatives' goodwill. Everyone marveled over how big you'd gotten, but you could read the shock in their faces: You had been ravaged by hormones; you were not cute anymore.

Several years ago one of our aunts in Guangzhou had taken Jasmine for some kind of treatment promised to resolve her cystic acne; there was an allergic reaction, something to do with a needle, and many screaming recriminations, and Jasmine never went back to China again.

You were struggling enough to become a subject in the culture that you knew. Now was the worst time to throw into the mix all the possible versions of you that you now could not be. All you could see was the ways in which the Chinese kids were better than you: poreless, sweatless, excellent at math, skilled at weaving their bikes in and out of traffic. How cruel it was to throw a steak-fed, butter-creamy American child into Asia and ask: Could you survive here? Could you fit in?

God—and then they wanted you to speak! It was fine for small children to utter only one or two phrases in Chinese. Children were applauded if they could say anything coherent at all. But a fourteen-year-old was approaching adulthood, was educated now, and when a fourteen-year-old had to ask her mother to translate a phrase like “Is there ginger in this?” it put her in a different tier of shame.

I saw these teenagers; I knew all they felt was stupid, slow, and inadequate, just as I had felt on those trips. This was an alien environment, and though their parents could switch back without effort, that bridge had been shattered for them long ago. It was not happening for them anymore. And each trip would be more uncomfortable, more alienating and diminishing, until they stopped coming at all.

It doesn't matter, I wanted to tell them. Stop counting down the minutes. Ask for the words you don't know. Use your phone. Use your bad grammar. Be stupid, slow, and inadequate. Just be here.

I only ever returned to the apartment to sleep these days, which meant often I did not come back until around midnight. I could therefore avoid any interaction with Anna. Sometimes she was already fast asleep when I got back, or at least nestled so deeply in bed that she could pretend not to notice me. Sometimes she didn't come back all night. I considered asking her about her schedule, just so I could spend an evening in for once.

But I didn't want her to know I cared. I enjoyed this game of chicken—bluffing that we both had somewhere better to be. I liked staying out. I took pride in my capability to roam, untethered, unbothered.

I received an email reminder from Klook: My Pinglin County Tea Tour was in twenty-four hours, the bus pickup point was outside one of the entrances to the Taipei 101 station, and I would recognize my guide by his blue-and-white checkered flag. I had entirely forgotten about this tour. Anna and I had booked it during our first week in Taipei, when we were still determined to go on day trips every weekend.

I decided to go: The activity was well reviewed, and I had already paid. If Anna wanted to join me, then she was welcome.

Anna did not come. I was the only solo traveler. The activity description had promised a private tour, but I understood now that this meant it was a private tour for all the strangers who showed up to comprise the group.

There was a white family from Philadelphia, which I knew because the parents kept informing the people in the rows in front of and behind them that they were from Philadelphia. There was an Asian American family decked out entirely in Harvard gear: T-shirts, caps, backpacks, and everything. The mother and father were sleekly attractive, and their twin sons, who looked about my age, were inappropriately tall. There were three Singaporean women with the palest skin I'd ever seen, covered head-to-toe with hats, sunglasses, and long-sleeved shirts.

Last on the bus was a couple about my age, perhaps a bit older, whom I couldn't have placed racially or nationally if I'd tried. They were late; they came sprinting onto the bus five minutes past the designated departure time. I thought perhaps the girl was at least part Chinese because she apologized to the driver in fluent, melodic Mandarin. But when they got on the bus behind me, they kept toggling between French and English. The boy was handsome, but the girl was unbearably beautiful, with pale skin and freckles and thick, loosely curled brown hair. I couldn't keep looking at them; I was so jealous.

Our tour guide was a squat, smiling man with glasses. He introduced himself as Jackie: “like Jackie Chan, so you won't forget.” He explained he had styled himself as Jackie several years ago because tourists kept butchering his real name, and there was a pause before everyone chuckled.

Jackie spoke into a microphone at the front of the bus. There were mini speakers installed at intervals along the ceiling, so that no matter where we sat, it sounded like he was speaking right in our ears. We were making three stops today: first, a tea plantation; second, a village teashop to experience a traditional tea pouring ceremony; and third, the Pinglin Tea Museum. It was about a ninety-minute drive to our first location, and we had a lot to do, so he hoped that we had all used the restroom.

Jackie played a few Taiwanese pop songs over the speakers, but one of the Singaporeans complained that the static was giving her a headache, so he stopped. We drove on for a while in silence, and then Jackie told us a story about how once upon a time, in another life as a delivery driver, he had been so prone to falling asleep on the road that he had resorted to chewing betel nuts as he drove with a tin bucket in his lap. Then he laughed and said not to worry; our driver today was much more responsible.

Our first stop was along a mountain road beneath an oolong tea field: a slope of dark-green shrubs in neat, terraced rows. Jackie told us that many of the blends that we thought were different teas were in fact the same plant: The leaves had just been processed differently. Black tea was just heavily oxidized green tea, did we know? The Singaporeans gasped. The Philadelphians accused Jackie of pulling their leg, but then one of the Harvard parents looked it up and confirmed: Black and green teas came from the same plant. Jackie explained that the fields we were looking at were a special variety of oolong that was harvested only after the leaves had been bitten by leafhoppers. This tea was called Chinese text, which translated to “honey-fragrant oolong.” When brewed, Jackie claimed, this tea was just as fragrant as honey.

“Chinese text,” I said. I had just learned this chengyu in Thought and Society. It meant: When the bitter times end, the sweet times begin.

“No, no,” said Jackie. “It's just a chemical process.”

We had half an hour to roam around the plantation, but we had to stay behind the ropes. The dad from Philadelphia reached over and plucked a leaf to chew, and Jackie yelled at him to stop. Jackie didn't know the owner of these fields. We could park here, but we were only entitled to the road.

We weren't allowed to touch the tea leaves. Only the leafhoppers could.

Everyone splintered off to photograph the fields. I was obviously alone, so the mother of the Harvard family asked if I wouldn't mind taking some photos for the family. The twins were so tall, it was hard to get all of them in the same frame.

I tried several angles, but no matter what I did, the twins looked enormous, or the parents looked like children. The mother swiped through every photo when I handed her phone back, and I could tell she didn't like them at all, but still she said, “Very nice, thank you.”

She spoke English without any trace of an accent. I asked if she had family in Taiwan, and she said no; she was Chinese American, and her folks were from the mainland, around Shanghai. “But Taiwan was easier to get to without a visa. It's the first time the boys have come anywhere in Asia; we wanted them to have a better idea of where they were from.”

There was no sense in which any of us were from Taiwan, but I understood her point. So they were just like me—using Taiwan as an entry point to the imperial core.

“My colleagues said that Taiwan is like, China on easy mode,” said her husband.

I asked what he meant by that, and he said, “I suppose it's easier to visit democracies. Everyone said Taiwan would be safer.”

I asked what they had done so far, and the mother rattled off the classics: Taipei 101, Elephant Mountain, the National Palace Museum, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. One of the sons was interested in jazz, and so they had attended a basement jazz concert they'd seen advertised on a flyer, but she wasn't terribly impressed by the music. It had sounded more like a student production. No one did any improvising; they just played from sheet music, and not very well. “We're from Brooklyn,” she told me. “So our standards are a bit higher.”

Our second stop was a traditional tea shop in Pinglin. Jackie asked us to split into two tables, one that could speak Chinese and one that couldn't. He would do an English translation at the non-Chinese table, but the Chinese speakers could hear directly from our host, Master Luo. I sat down at the Chinese-speaking table with the attractive maybe-French couple and the Singaporeans. There was some confusion near the English-speaking table. It appeared that between the Philadelphians and the Harvard family there was not enough space, and so someone would have to join us.

Jackie asked if anyone might be willing to translate. I glanced at the Singaporeans, and then at the attractive couple, and when nobody raised a hand, I said I could give it a try. Rolling his eyes, one of the twins came over and sat down beside me. He smelled sweaty and sour, in a confusingly pleasant way—the same way J.C had smelled. He was, alas, quite handsome. But I was immune to that now.

Master Luo explained that the steeping procedure he was about to demonstrate wasn't particularly fussy or ceremonial. That was more of a Japanese preoccupation. He was just going to show us the standard way to enjoy tea at home—the methods of getting the most nuanced, complex flavors out of the leaves. Still, the steeping process was far more complicated than I had expected. First, Master Luo filled a clay teapot with dried leaves—up to about two-thirds, so that the leaves would have room to expand. Then he poured in water heated to precisely 90 degrees Celsius. Different teas flourished at different temperatures.

We could not commit the American mistake of splashing boiling water over everything. The first steep took only twenty seconds. Oolong leaves were meant to be steeped multiple times, at longer intervals each time, and we wouldn't unlock the leaves' true potential until the sixth or seventh steeps.

He poured the first steep into narrow porcelain cups. The first steep was never that good, he admitted; more like a quick shower for the leaves, but still we had to drink it. But we couldn't drink out of these cups. We had to place a second set of wider cups upside down over the narrow cups and then flip them both, then pull away the narrow cups, so that the tea ended up in the wider cups.

Everyone spilled. Master Luo said it took practice. Then we still couldn't drink the tea, because we had to appreciate its aromas first.

“Smell it,” he said, gesturing to the empty narrow cup. “Let the flavor unfold.”

I sniffed my cup. It just smelled like tea. First whisky, now tea—where were these alleged fruity notes?

“You can roll the empty cup in your hands for warmth.” Master Luo demonstrated. “Feel.”

“Why are we rolling?” the twin asked me.

“Just like, for the warmth.” We both copied Master Luo, rubbing the cups vigorously between our palms.

“But it's so hot out.”

It was true; I would never have thought my hands needed warming up until I had an empty, fragrant teapot before me. “I think there's medicinal benefits.”

“Eyeballs too.” Master Luo rubbed his cup over his face.

“Eyes too,” I told the twin.

“Why did we have to flip the cups?” asked the twin.

Master Luo had given some explanation, but I hadn't quite followed.

“Oxidization,” I said, and the twin nodded, like this made perfect sense. “The tea has to breathe.”

When the tasting concluded, Jackie told us the store was offering us a 10 percent discount on loose-leaf teas, just for us, because we'd been such pleasant customers. I bought a pack of the honey-aroma leafhopper-bitten tea. Master Luo told me it was best on its sixth or seventh steep, when it turned the color of a certain wine pronounced “xiáduolǐ,” which I thought might be a Sicilian wine until I realized he was saying “Chardonnay.” I made a mental note to investigate the color of Chardonnay.

“That was very impressive,” the Harvard mother said to me. “How did you get such good Chinese?”

I told her and her husband all about the program: the rigorous schedule, the many electives, the small class sizes, and the demanding homework.

“That's fantastic,” said the father. He turned to his sons. “You should think about something like that next summer. Go on, ask her about the deadline.”

“I think Harvard has a summer school in Beijing,” said the taller twin.

“They do,” I said, “but Harvard's program isn't as good as ours. Ours is the best by a lot.”

The twins seemed not to believe me. They didn't ask me how to apply.

Our last stop was at the Pinglin Tea Museum.

Jackie distributed our printed tickets as we stepped off the bus. He had visited this museum many times, so he was going to wait for us outside. We were to meet him at the drop-off point no later than five o'clock. We could not be late. The bus could stall in front for only so long, and we had to beat the evening traffic into the city.

Jackie went down our group, making each of us verbally confirm: five o'clock. Then he waved goodbye and stepped back onto the bus.

I wandered half-heartedly into the exhibit hall. I was chiefly invested in finding a place to sit. I had drunk nine cups of tea in the last hour; I was dizzy from the caffeine, and I'd heard quite enough about the picking, drying, oxidizing, and rolling processes. I found a bench just past the entrance and tipped my head back against the wall. My fingers tingled.

A series of paintings hung on the wall across from me: a blown-up illustration of prokaryotes, a colony in a petri dish, and what I was certain was the Big Bang. The label below read: “the Alchemy of Steeping / the Birth of Creation.”

Now this was interesting. I stood up. The signs on the wall explained: Tea was made by steeping leaves in water. A simple concept, but this metaphor in fact held the secret to all life on earth. The universe was created through steeping. Organic matter was steeped in a primordial soup, and from this sprang life as we know it. Prokaryotes became people.

Steeping was a genesis, a metamorphosis: Through steeping, the small became large, the concentrated became diffuse, the hard became soft, the dirty became clean, and the sick became cured. What a simple yet profound observation! I could think of many things that became better versions of themselves after being steeped in hot water: instant noodles, shiitake mushrooms, Magic Grow sea animals.

Farther back in the museum there was a table where you could sniff jars filled with tea leaves of different varieties, but this seemed like an afterthought. Whoever had curated this exhibit was clearly more excited by the cosmological significance of steeping. There were jars of probably-fake organs floating suspended in liquid. There was a plastic Japanese schoolgirl sitting atop a ramen cup. There was a life-size plastic exhibit of three capybaras floating happily in a bath. Two were sipping tea from cups, and all three had oranges on their heads. There was a life-size replica of E.T. I searched my memories of that film, but I still couldn't figure out what E.T. had to do with the pleasure of steeping. I asked the museum docent, who told me that she wasn't sure, that perhaps E.T. was there just for fun.

At five o'clock, Jackie, true to his word, was waiting by the door. The Singaporeans, the Philadelphians, and the attractive maybe-French couple were ready in the foyer, but most of the Harvard family was missing. Only the mother was present.

“What happened?” Jackie asked her, in English.

“Oh, they're just downstairs looking for a bathroom,” said the mother. “They'll be back up in a second.”

This was too much for Jackie's English—apparently, he was fluent only when sticking to his script. “What?”

“They . . .” The mother tried switching to Chinese. But she didn't have the words, and the more distressed she got, the more rudimentary her speech became. “One moment,” she said over and over. “Wait—can you just wait?”

But Jackie too was getting distressed. He told her, in Chinese, that the driver couldn't keep stalling; they couldn't block the driveway, other tourist vans had to get out. Where were they?

How long would they be? The Harvard mother seemed to understand but couldn't formulate a reply. “Everyone else has to get back to Taipei,” said Jackie; “it's not fair to keep them waiting.” He swept his arm toward me and the Singaporean women, and we all stood stiff, unwilling props. I tried making a sympathetic face, but I did not want to intervene. The moment stretched, agonizing, and then at last the husband and sons ascended the stairs. The mother hurried them out toward the bus, demanding to know why they were late.

“What's happened?” the husband kept asking. “What's wrong?”

“Chill,” said one of the twins. “We're not that late.” This was true—it was only five minutes past the meeting time. The driver did not seem to care; he just waved us onto the bus. But Jackie and the mother were acting like this was the worst thing that could have happened, like the whole tour had been ruined.

We were all subdued on the ride home. Everyone was tired, and everyone had to pee. We'd drunk nine steeps of oolong tea, after all. The physical pressure was painful—like a hot knife dug into my bladder. Jackie told us that traffic was heavy, that they had planned to make the drive in one straight shot, but there was a clamor of protests, and we pulled off the road toward a rest stop.

When we got back on the highway, the traffic had thickened, and we sat stationary outside the city for nearly half an hour. We would not reach Taipei 101 until past seven, Jackie announced grimly. That was the best-case scenario; who knew how bad this traffic would get? He was very sorry, but we had to understand this was not his fault, and he hoped it would not influence our reviews.

The Harvard mother sat slouched in the row before me, her cheek pressed against the window. Her husband asked her where she wanted to do dinner, and she snapped that she didn't know, that he could do some trip planning for once.

“You have to take lessons,” she told her sons. “Ask that girl about her program.”

“Okay, Mom,” said one of the twins.

“No, I want you to actually ask that girl. Her Chinese is so good—ask her right now.”

“Mom,” said the other.

She sat back in her seat, arms folded. Her husband reached for her arm, but she shook him off.

I could have leaned forward and shared what I knew, that I, too, had once been so insecure about my Chinese. I could have told them the exact tuition rates and the summer session dates and the government fellowships that would make it nearly free to attend. I could have even told the mother that there was a private tutoring option too; that she could make a serious study of Mandarin at any time she liked, since she could obviously afford it. But I knew they didn't want to hear any more from me. This wasn't my identity crisis to manage.

I found an independent cinema called Spot in an outdoor complex called the Huashan 1914 Creative Park, which was built on the grounds of an old sake distillery. Huashan 1914 was frequented by both gaggles of chain-smoking teenagers buying used records and young parents pushing strollers, browsing through hand-sewn Japanese handbags. Whoever curated films for Spot seemed to screen things with equal interest across release dates, regions, and genres. There was no theme; it could be Italian neorealism one day and Hong Kong martial arts cinema the next.

I began purchasing tickets to whatever film was showing that afternoon. I wanted to find out what the Taiwanese cinephiles were into.

Over the next week, I ended up watching a series of three films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi: Like Nothing Happened, Passion, and I Love Thee for Good. Hamaguchi's films were all about how men and women want to sleep together, but things keep getting in the way. Passion was my favorite. It was about a group of friends reuniting after college, trying to sort through their old sexual entanglements by asking each other dirty, loaded questions. They can't refuse to answer any questions—they have to be totally transparent.

This reminded me of many dormitory parties I'd attended over the last year. We'd often played a game called Hot Seat, in which the person in the Hot Seat had to answer truthfully every question posed to them over the next sixty seconds. The questions usually had to do with whom they had slept with, or wanted to sleep with, or disliked for sleeping with someone that they wanted to sleep with.

But you could never get a straight answer out of the person in the Hot Seat, no matter how specifically you worded your questions. It was the same in Hamaguchi's Passion. Everyone was horny but exhausted, speaking in codes, trying to communicate to just a single person that they were interested, but in a veiled way, so they wouldn't think they were too interested.

Why was it so hard to speak plainly? What would happen if they said outright, I want to sleep with you? What if I had said to J.C, I want to go home?

I found all this strangely reassuring. So not all barriers came from language. You could be perfectly fluent in Japanese and still fail to communicate anything essential.

In Passion, there were two characters who talked in circles about their codes of ethics, their disdain for their sluttier friends, and their opposing philosophies on love for nearly two hours, and you got the sense that they despised each other, but then they had a fight in the bathroom, and the guy pushed the girl under the shower and turned it on, and it seemed very violent, and for a moment I was nervous for the girl, but then they started making out. So language could only get you so far. Sometimes you just had to make out fully clothed in the shower.

The only trouble with Hamaguchi's films was the subtitles. The characters spoke in Japanese, and the screen displayed three sets of subtitles: English, Japanese, and Chinese. I understood a little bit of all three. English I had. Chinese I was getting close.

Japanese I had tried to learn in middle school when I underwent my anime phase, and though I had forgotten almost all the complex grammar, the easy bits—sumimasen, arigatou gozaimasu, ganbatte!—were engraved in my brain. I should have just followed along in the English. But I had come into the theater primed to read Chinese, so when I saw the Chinese subtitles, my eyes gravitated there first. Watching a movie in triplicate was no good. All three subtitles conveyed slightly different things. The overall plot was intelligible, but the nuances seemed important.

For instance, there was a world of difference between “Never mind” and “You could never possibly understand.”

I couldn't tell if I was getting better or worse at Chinese, only that my utterances were getting stranger. In my one-on-one class, I had decided to stop trying to contort my thoughts to fit assigned grammar patterns. Instead of answering questions with the straightforward constructions suggested by the textbook, I would manipulate whatever building blocks I had to express whatever I was thinking about at the moment.

When I didn't have a concept, I would talk around it until Teacher Sun figured out what I was trying to say. Teacher Sun asked me if I believed in reincarnation, and I didn't know how to say “the immortality of the soul,” so I said: “Can a soul come back? What is it coming back from? What is a soul? What is it made out of? Is it memory? Without memory, is a person a person?”

“Aha,” said Teacher Sun. She wrote a phrase on the board: Chinese text. The soul is immortal—literally, the soul does not perish.

The city and all its symbols didn't give me headaches anymore. I no longer felt any pressure to breach that wall of meaning. I'd gotten comfortable with incomprehension, and I felt this looseness in my bones. All the tendons relaxed in my jaw. I didn't mind if I couldn't decipher a street sign or a passing conversation. Perceptions were like clear water running through the rivulets in my mind. They came and went, but nothing stuck.

No more of this panicked scramble for meaning. I could hold on to an observation, blink at it, and then let it go.

Teacher Sun taught me a nice phrase: Chinese text—chéndiàn, “to settle.” I looked it up in the dictionary. It was a chemistry term—to settle, to precipitate. Teacher Sun used it to talk about my emotions. She told me she thought I was looking calmer, less distressed these days. She gestured with one hand like a cup, and with the other imitated a spoon swirling a liquid inside.

I thought it meant that I was sinking into depression, but she said that settling wasn't a bad thing. “Water is clearer after the dust has settled,” she said. “It means that you sort out all the bad and dirty things. You just wait, and then slowly, things fall into place.”

I saw a 1982 film called Nomad by the Hong Kong director Patrick Tam. As usual, I had known nothing about the film going in, and for the first hour I thought it was just a romantic comedy about four Hong Kong youths goofing around on an island: Louis, Kathy, Pong, and the improbably named Tomato. But then Kathy's ex-boyfriend Shinsuke shows up from Japan. You think he's trying to win Kathy back, but the stakes are higher than that. Shinsuke is being hunted by the Japanese Red Army, a group of communist terrorists from which he defected. Shinsuke tries to get Kathy to hide him, but the Japanese Red Army track him down, and then most of the characters wind up dead. A harpoon gun is involved. The moral of the story is that you can't escape history. You can cut yourself adrift and pretend it has nothing to do with you, but then a terrorist might come along and make your ex-boyfriend do seppuku on the beach.

My grief was not that special. Andrew had had a point, that night in the bar. Ask around and every first-, second-, even third-generation Asian American had a sob story somewhere in the family tree.

The booms in migration that landed our parents in the U.S all had to do with Cold War devastations. Mainlander? Someone got got in the Cultural Revolution. Mainlander in the eighties? Someone was fleeing Beijing after the Tiananmen Square massacre—well, that, or someone got into graduate school. Vietnamese? Saigon fell, and then everyone was piling onto boats. Hmong, Laotian, Cambodian? Forget about it.

History mangled everyone. We weren't the only ones cursed. And my personal tragedy derived not from the fact that it had happened but the fact that no one had thought to include me in this story—the child's indignation that this was not all about me.

Another Klook notification for a reservation I had forgotten about: a day trip to Yehliu Geopark. I'd also forgotten what Yehliu Geopark was, or why we'd found it interesting enough to book this trip, but I didn't have anything better to do that weekend.

My driver was Jackie. “Hello!” He seemed not to recognize me. “Just us today?”

The small-group vehicle could fit up to six, but I was the only one who had shown up. It was a day of record-breaking heat, the third consecutive day on which this record had been broken. Probably everyone else had chosen to stay near the A.C.

I showed Jackie my reservation code and mentioned I'd been on his Pinglin tea tour.

“Okay, fantastic!” He gave no indication of whether he remembered me or not. He persisted in speaking to me in English, even though I'd been responding in Chinese. “You are traveling alone?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“Taipei is a great place to travel alone. Very safe!”

Jackie put on his Taiwanese pop playlist, and off we went. “Teresa Teng,” he told me, gesturing to the radio. I gathered this was the name of the singer. “You know Teresa Teng? It's very sad. She died in Thailand, just forty-two.” I asked Jackie how she had died, and he shook his head. “We'll never know.”

Yehliu Geopark was on a small cape just off the coast of Taiwan's northern tip. The beach was dotted with dark, lumpy rocks, stretching out of the sand like squiggling worms trying to break free.

“Hoodoo stones,” said Jackie.

I didn't know this word. “Voodoo?”

“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 jawbone 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 came with 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 had no memory of 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 2 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 most virtuous trait. 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 at the 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.

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 U.C 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?”

“A little bit of everything.” She transferred the contents of her grocery bags into the refrigerator. Plastic-wrapped onigiri, cartons of unsweetened soy milk, poached tea eggs, steamed pork buns dripping oil through their container. “I got some instant ramen too.”

“Jeez.”

“You can have some if you want.”

“No, I'll just go back to the 7-Eleven; I think it's still open.”

“No, seriously. I bought too much. It's going to go bad. Just have some.” Anna stepped around me. “I'm going to take a shower, okay? I'm all sticky, it's so humid.”

“Okay.”

Anna went into the bathroom. I pulled my things off the bed and sat on the edge of the couch, staring at my hands. I breethd in and out, willing myself to calm. She was being nice. I should be nice. This was progress.

Anna stepped out of the shower, flushed and damp. “Much better,” she said.

I tried to remember all the reasons I disliked her. It was hard to conjure up any real animosity. I knew I could be angry, but that would take so much effort. I had been over the accounting of wrongdoing so many times in my head now, and it all came out as a wash.

Anna peered out the window. “It's so calm out there.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Feels weird to be trapped inside.”

I told her what Teacher Sun had said about the winds—how they could be dangerous even if everything looked calm from behind a window, how you could be walking down the street and a piece of scrap metal could pierce your skull.

Anna scoffed. “Where's the scrap metal coming from?”

“Like, just lying about.”

“Where is there scrap metal just lying around in Taipei?”

“Old buildings? Construction sites? I don't know.”

We peered out the window. A light rain had begun, so faint we wouldn't have been able to tell except for the gray dappling the sidewalk.

“I went to a hurricane party once,” said Anna. “Near Orlando. It's a whole thing over there. I was visiting my friend from camp and there was a Category Two hurricane coming through that weekend, and everyone was so excited about it because that meant school and work were canceled for the day.”

“Was it scary?”

“No, it was just white moms drinking wine and teaching each other how to Dougie,” said Anna. “I'm serious. They had this huge plank, like a wooden ski, with five holes at intervals where you could fit shot glasses. They would stand five in a row and do shots. They did like, eight shots. They love hurricanes up there. It's like a holiday from God.”

This made sense to me. The storm absolved all your excuses. You couldn't go on with your day; you had to cancel your plans, shelter in place. And you didn't know if the storm would wreck everything and kill everyone, so you had to be nice to everyone—just in case.

Anna made instant ramen for our dinner. I felt a tender pang, watching as she fastidiously folded back the paper lids halfway, shook in the flavor packets, and filled the water up to the line. She put little plates upside down over the cups while the noodles soaked. “It traps the steam,” she said.

She set a timer on her phone for two and a half minutes, and when it rang, she carefully peeled the lids away and set the cups atop the little plates to catch drips. I lit my candle and placed it in the middle of the coffee table, even though the electricity was still working. Anna passed me a set of disposable chopsticks.

“Chinese text,” she said. Words of a Chinese mother. “Eat it while it's hot.”

“I'm really sorry,” I said at last, once we'd finished our noodles. It took me that long to gather the courage. “About J.C.”

“Oh.” Anna snorted. “No, I'm sorry. That was all so stupid. Actually, he's dating Margrit now.”

“Doesn't she have a fiancé?”

“I think they broke up.”

“Really?” I thought of that nice, ruddy-cheeked man on Margrit's phone screen. “That seems like a big decision.”

“It's not really about J.C,” said Anna. “I mean, maybe a little. They seem to really like each other, it's pretty gross. But I think Margrit's been looking for an excuse to get out of that relationship. Helmut is very traditional, you see.

He wants Margrit to settle down and raise their children as soon as they get married. But Margrit speaks so many languages, and she wouldn't get to use them on a sheep farm.”

We decided to watch a Taiwanese show called Wave Makers.

It was a fictional drama about young political aides working on a campaign before a big election. The main theme was sexual harassment in Taiwanese politics. The protagonist, a recent graduate who had been harassed by the opposition party's candidate, her former professor, was played by an actress named Gingle Wang. I found her very compelling.

“That makes sense,” said Anna. “She's pretty in that way you like.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean her face is always stuck in this expression, like someone just yelled at her, and she's pouting, and now you have to protect her.” Anna pointed to the screen, where Gingle was pouting at that very moment. “Sorry, but it's really annoying.”

“She's pouting because she's upset!”

“Well yes, but you get the sense that she does it habitually. Like, for attention.” Anna was scrolling through Gingle Wang's Wikipedia page. “I just think she has very thin lips. Don't you think her lips are too thin?”

I had not paid much thought to Gingle Wang's lips, but now that Anna pointed it out, I couldn't unsee it. We tried another episode, but Anna could bear only so much of Gingle Wang's shrinking affect, and so we switched to a Taiwanese film: Marry My Dead Body, a comedy about a homophobic cop who accidentally winds up married to the ghost of a gay man. Gingle Wang was in this film too, but she did less pouting, and her part was not big enough to bother Anna. The film was primarily about the (formerly) homophobic cop and the gay ghost teaming up to fight crime.

We were both falling asleep by the final act. I felt Anna drooping against my shoulder, but I didn't want to wake her up. For once, I didn't mind the slow passage of time. I understood now the pleasure of storms. They made any shelter feel more precious. Outside, the hammering winds, the roaring rains.

Such precarious safety within these four walls. I liked this scene; I tried to commit its details to memory. The quivering candle. The hot, spicy broth settling in my stomach, and Anna's soft, steady breathing.

Teacher Lin was right. The storm was barely a storm; it passed after a few hours of rainfall, and the next morning, the skies were clear. At two in the morning, the department sent an email announcing that classes were not canceled for the rest of the week after all. The final presentations proceeded as scheduled.

Each Thought and Society class was to present as a panel: We would sit at a long table at the front of the room and deliver our speeches one after another. We weren't required to listen to other classes' presentations, but many students stayed to watch their friends. The lecture room was packed. Students kept trickling in, but there was only standing room at the back.

I went last. I had finished writing my essay only the night before, and I had stayed up late committing it to memory. I used the most difficult phrases as mnemonics, stepping stones I had carved into my brain: linguistic determinism (Chinese text), the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Chinese text), conceptual metaphor (Chinese text). I only had to nail these terms.

Everything else was linking material. I talked about how some cultures had richer vocabularies for describing color or taste than others, and how this correlated with a more discerning palate for both. I talked about how learning other languages couldn't help us see the future, but how languages did map space differently onto time.

In English, for instance, the future lay before you. In Chinese, the future lay behind. The phrase for future generations—Chinese text—used the same 後 as “behind.” I told everyone what Teacher Sun had told me: that the Chinese believed you could see the past, but you could only walk blindly backward into the future.

I told them my theory that speaking different languages altered not only our perceptions of the world but also our understandings of ourselves. I made a joke—“Some of our classmates seem to become entirely different people when they ascend from the second floor to the third!”—and all the teachers chuckled. I had two paragraphs to go; I was nearly finished.

“I have always been ashamed of my Chinese self,” I said. “She was too young, too immature, too inarticulate. Basically, she was an idiot. I wanted to keep her hidden inside classrooms—inside a safe learning space—until she had caught up to me, until she wouldn't embarrass herself by opening her mouth. But as time went on, the gap between my two selves never got any smaller, and I was so ashamed, I didn't let her speak until it was too late.

“My grandfather—that is, my grandfather recently passed away.” I had practiced this transition a dozen times, yet I could not help the hiccup. “And this really affected me, because I always felt that the purpose of language learning was to communicate with another person. Leaning Chinese was about access. I wanted to talk to my family—that was the entire point.

But now I'm wondering: What happens when you're late to the conversation? What does Chinese do for you then? I wanted to wait until I became a person he could really converse with.

But I wasn't fast enough. All I have now are questions, but at least I have learned to phrase them in his terms. I can move through the world with his language, at least a little. That will have to be enough. Um.” I cleared my throat. “So that's my speech. Thank you, everyone.”

The room was very still when I finished. It was not the impressed kind of silence. Someone was supposed to ask me a question now, but no one raised their hand. I wished I had just spoken about foreign direct investment in China, or diet and exercise culture among youths in America. Some of the teachers leaned forward, eyebrows raised, as if they were concerned I was about to cry. I had never gotten over that embarrassing instinct that if someone was Chinese, they must be related to me. And I understood I couldn't treat my teachers like they were my parents, that it was unfair and racially suspect. But just then, I did feel a sheltering kindness in the room.

Teacher Sun raised her hand.

I pointed to her. “Yes?”

“So what would you ask him?”

“Sorry?”

“If you could have that last conversation with your gonggong right now.” She beamed. “What would you ask him?”

N.T.U E-PROOF—not FOR SALE

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Interstitial 1

Tell me about your parents.

Dainty, right? Is dainty the word?

How did they tell you they were sending you back?

Did it feel like a foreign country?

In what way did it feel like yours?

How was your Mandarin?

How long did it take you to learn?

Who did you like to read?

Did you also listen to Liszt?

The Great Men—did you meet them?

Did it seem real?

Any of it?

When did the dream collapse?

During the war,—

In the army,—

When the Japanese,—

After the war,—

During the Great Leap Forward,—

During the Great Famine,—

During the Cultural Revolution,—

When Mao died,—

Why didn't you leave?

Did you ever try?

Did you sing that song about Baldy Chiang?

When was the last time you saw them?

When did you find out?

When did you know for sure?

Why didn't you ever go to see your sister?

My uncles,—

Why did you choose my mother?

Did you ever regret it?

Do you ever ask questions to people who can't answer?

Who do you speak to in the dark?

N.T.U E-PROOF—not FOR SALE

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Chinese text

Known facts, contours of a life. Shipped off at fourteen to relatives he'd never met, to a country he'd never set foot in, for no other reason than a dream. Dreams had currency then. Dynasties fell, empires rose, great powers went to war, and the maps of the world were redrawn in an instant. In the early twentieth century, the grand narrative was about civilizational evolution. Darwin and Spencer made their way to China, and China's intellectuals concluded: Adapt, or go extinct. Modernity was coming to the East; the Yellow Race was catching up. This nation is diseased, wrote Liang Qichao; ignorant, feeble, backward; we need a new people, we must become strong.

At school, reading Rousseau and de Tocqueville, the boy too was compelled by this collective daydream, the constitutional foundations of a new China. The Qing dynasty was overthrown, the National Assembly declared a republic, and democracy was on the horizon. Then came the war, and the civil war after that. He went into the army, where he developed habits he kept for the rest of his life: obsessive hand-washing, for that warded off dysentery; ramrod-straight posture; pants ironed to creases so sharp you could trace a pencil down his leg.

The Cold War: promises of utopia ending at the strait, but on either side, families were torn apart, newspapers shut down, protestors disappeared. He did not leave for Taiwan, and he did not dare entertain regrets about whether he should have.

Everyone was starving. They were starving even in Cambodia, where the land was so fertile it was said you could shit in the dirt and seeds would sprout. Yet somehow there was a famine, and whispers of worse, but so little news made it past the borders.

The silence was agony. Finally a letter arrived from a refugee camp in Thailand. From his sister: Our parents are gone. My husband is gone. My sons are gone.

We are the only ones left. He never asked for more details than that. He wasn't there; he didn't have the right.

His sister had been an English teacher before the war. She had provided translation services at the camp, and for that, the Americans told her they'd send her wherever she wanted to go. California, or the mainland? She asked her brother for advice—how are things over there?

Don't come, he begged her. Go on.

The world swung to the right. The Communist dictators stepped down or were deposed; their agrarian utopias would never come to pass. China opened its markets and invited the world in. All his neighbors were starting businesses: electronics shops, sneaker stores. Pig farmers became millionaires.

Those were the golden years. Dreams had currency again. When the borders relaxed, he felt like he'd won.

He had been right after all, to hold on to his hand, to insist on riding it out. The madness could not last forever. Things had to revert to the mean. All three of his daughters went off to college, and then all three found good jobs, and husbands with even better jobs.

They purchased homes. They showed him the running water, electricity, the porcelain toilet seats—bidets, imported from Japan, so much more hygienic, just press this button to make it stop. Still vivid the memory of the famine years, and now they didn't blink at banquet dinners at Sky No. 1—a restaurant where you could reserve a private room in a skyscraper high over a developing Guangzhou. The waiters brought tender chicken over mushrooms, honey-glazed short ribs, steamed shrimp upon beds of vermicelli. His stomach hurt. He said he wanted yams, and twenty minutes later the chef sent up a plate of intricately carved taro, cassava, and Japanese sweet potato; half were steamed, the other half sautéed with crystallized brown sugar.

Old people prefer the simple food, joked the waitress. She took a photo for them, showed him the phone, and he was stunned by this vision: the patriarch, the matriarch, surrounded by plump, well-fed daughters. Are we royalty? he asked, and they laughed; Ba, everyone eats like this now.

His youngest daughter off to Los Angeles, and then off to U.C Irvine, where she married the first engineering student from China she met. They followed his work to Massachusetts, and they bought a house with multiple bedrooms and a front yard where he could plant fruit trees and trust they'd stay long enough to see the harvest. Space was different here in the suburbs.

There was no bus, there was no sidewalk, you had to drive just to get some fruit for the mornings, but he had never learned how. It was so quiet. No neighbors peeping out their windows; no washing lines strung up between buildings. This was the land of individual freedoms.

Every man on his island, and if someone stood on your sidewalk, said his daughter, you were allowed to shoot them.

They expected him to stay. Everyone wanted to go to America, set down anchors for the chain; everyone got a green card, became naturalized, got a job and a retirement account, and then brought their parents over as well. But he didn't like relying on others. He liked knowing every face on the block, and he liked being able to walk out his own front door and know exactly where he would end up, and when his son-in-law asked him quietly if they might talk, it was a relief.

See you soon. Not that soon. They were too busy to visit, the flight too long.

When the girls did come, they asked constantly how many days were left before they could go. They were impatient with this land of squatting toilets, uncertain Wi-Fi, the lack of air-conditioning. They wanted the Nintendo, they were upset about missing a birthday party, they didn't like the food their popo cooked at home: the way she tossed everything into the steamer for breakfast, eggs and pork buns and slices of bread alike. Too soggy, they complained. Who puts sandwich bread in a steamer? Let's have a proper dinner, said his daughter, and off they went, again to Sky No. 1. The girls did not care for the view.

Too much smog, they said; you can't see anything. They whined that the orange juice tasted funny and shuddered at the pickled chicken's feet and cold sliced tripe, and did not know to pour tea for their elders, and did not take seconds when urged. He looked at them and tried to feel proud.

Chatty, chubby foreigners. They were happy, but they were not his.

He rode in the car with them to Baiyun International Airport and waited with them in line to check their bags. When do we take off? The girls kept asking. How long is the flight?

It's always good to see you, he told his daughter. Come home soon. She met his eyes, weary. Yes, soon—but it was not a promise so much as a deferral.

She didn't like China. She found it more foreign every time. Her Cantonese faltered; she never had occasion to use it anymore. She hated the smog, the taxis. She thought the food was dirty; she didn't let her daughters purchase sweet potatoes from street hawkers.

The crowds made her nervous. Too many people in this country, and she didn't like how they looked at her on the street—this woman with three children, at a time when most were given permission to have only one. Who had she bribed?

Once, visibly pregnant with the youngest, walking with the other two hand in hand, she'd been stopped at a crosswalk by a police officer, and she'd had to fish her American passport out of her purse before he let her go.

Twelve hours later she texted: landed safely, we're home.

Impossible now to find a time when the whole family could make the trip. Work was unsteady for his son-in-law; he lived in terror of being let go, and he couldn't take the time off. All three girls were in school, so nine months of the year were out, and when they were on break, the girls had summer camps, or sleepovers. It's not fair, they protested. They couldn't agree on anything else, but on this alone they put up a united front: Why do we have to spend all our breaks in China?

Maybe next summer, said his daughter; and then the summer after that, and then it was a meaningless refrain. Nobody's fault. The separation had been a long time coming. He knew he'd lost her. He had lost her the day he decided to give her away, as if children were interchangeable, as if one could make up for two, and it made no difference that it had been her lifelong dream to leave.

N.T.U E-PROOF—not FOR SALE

HarperCollinsPublishers

....................................

7

It rained overnight, and the morning air was cool and sweet. Everyone was in a good mood. The hallways were full of hugs and goodbyes, email exchanges, promises to visit. It was hard to believe that we were in the last week of class, that the program could be over in only three days, when it had seemed for the past two months that we would be cramming flash cards in the student lounge for the rest of our lives.

I was excited to get to my one-on-one class. I hadn't seen Teacher Sun since my final presentation, and I was hoping she would tell me what a great job I'd done.

“Oh, hi, Lily! Sit, sit.” Teacher Sun was chortling at her phone when I entered the room. “One of my former students just had his baby!” She turned the phone around to show me a white man cradling a bundle in his arms, his wife obscured in the background.

“Wow, congratulations! Does he live in America?”

“No, Taipei! It's a really interesting story.” She clapped her hands together. “He was a finance major when I met him. He wanted to work for one of those big banks, you know? They were all opening Asia branches back then, and he wanted to improve his Chinese so he could become a division head in Shanghai or something. I think perhaps his chances were not very good back in America. Like, he wasn't that good at finance—that's just the impression I got. But everyone was trying to make it big in Asia.”

“So did he?”

“He came really close! He did have an interview for a Shanghai branch of some bank. They flew him all the way to New York.” Teacher Sun sighed. “But in the end, he didn't get it.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I had a hunch. I knew it was going to go badly. Young men like that, they crack under pressure. They said something nasty to him, and it threw him off. He got defensive, and then he couldn't recover.”

“Wow,” I said. “Did he tell you that?”

“No, but I guessed that's what had happened. I could just tell from the look on his face when he said it hadn't gone well. They do that sometimes at these big firms.

They test you on purpose; they want to see how you react in adverse circumstances. Banking is really stressful, and you have to deal with lots of nasty clients. But this student wasn't cut out for an environment like that.

He was nice enough, but he always had a weak constitution. He couldn't take criticism. Anyway, that experience was a great psychological shock to him.” She waved her hand. “I was worried about him then—he seemed seriously depressed.

He kept showing up for classes, but I could tell his heart wasn't in it. He wasn't doing his homework, and he couldn't focus on anything. Finally I told him that he was wasting tuition money just showing up like this but not learning, so he dropped out of the program.”

“Bummer,” I said.

“But he's fine now! He never went back to America—I think he was unhappy there. He married a local girl, can you believe it? They founded an educational consulting company here in Taipei. They help Taiwanese students get into foreign universities and summer camps, that kind of thing. Business is great, apparently. They just bought their first apartment and everything.” She swiveled to her computer and began clicking through some files. “Do you want to see pictures from his wedding?”

“Oh—sure.”

“Here we are!” She pulled a selfie up on the screen. Her face loomed up close, devilish. Above her, the groom wore a distracted smile, like Teacher Sun had accosted him in the hallway right before he walked out to the stage.

I could see what she meant about a weak constitution. Something about his chin, the way it folded into his neck.

“Was it a nice wedding?”

“Actually, it was sort of awkward. Her parents paid for the wedding. Nice banquet, nice hotel, everything. Something you dress up for, you know? Then his family showed up in shorts and T-shirts. Like they were on vacation!”

“Didn't he tell them it was going to be a nice wedding?”

“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 J.C, 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 J.C'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 U.S-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. J.C 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. J.C 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 23 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 U.S 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.” Chinese text.

The waiter came with pitchers to replenish our broth just as the pots began to fizzle and smoke. Liping exclaimed that he was Chinese text: 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 Chinese text, 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 Chinese text: been in the same boat through wind and rain. We had Chinese text: 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-sized 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.

In Modern Taiwanese Literature, Shuya asked if he could purchase the subsequent volumes of the literature textbook from the program office. He wanted to keep reading Taiwanese literature on his own time.

“Well of course,” said Teacher Lin. “But your reading has gotten so good! You don't need a textbook to collate excerpts for you. You should just go to a bookstore.”

“But the gloss is very helpful,” said Shuya.

“That's good,” said Teacher Lin. “But the glosses are just taken from a dictionary. You have your own dictionary.”

“But then who should I read?” Shuya asked.

Teacher Lin wrote out a list of famous and beloved Taiwanese writers on the board for us: Bai Xianyong, Chen Ruoxi, Wu Mingyi, Zhu Tianwen. They were always in print; we could find them in bookstores anywhere, even back in the States. This would be a good place to start.

In my one-on-one class, Teacher Sun and I went through a vocabulary list of words associated with ancient Chinese philosophy: legalism, benevolence, filial piety, humanism. Then it was four o'clock, and we were done.

“Well, Lily!” She clapped her hands. “So our final class together has ended!”

My eyes prickled. “Teacher, I really loved learning Chinese with you.”

“I did as well, Lily! You've taught me some interesting things. I particularly enjoyed hearing your thoughts on alien languages.”

“I'd love to stay in touch,” I said. “Can I write you some emails after?”

“Of course!” Her expression closed. “If you want corrections on your Chinese, or anything like that, then you will have to arrange private tutoring rates with the program office. But I don't do private tutoring, so you will probably be paired with a different teacher.” She glanced at the clock. “Okay—that's time. Bye-bye, Lily! Have a safe trip home!”

I left the room embarrassed. I felt rejected, somehow. Had I completely misread our relationship?

But I couldn't hold it against her. Teacher Sun sat for eight hours each day with students tripping through their vocabulary, weeping over their essays. She had assumed a parental presence for me, and this was perhaps part of her pedagogical approach—the more comfortable and confident I felt, the more risks I took. She had watched me learn to express myself, to become emotionally articulate, to become a person in Chinese. She understood this. And she probably knew that, for the sake of easy detachment, it was better to pretend she didn't.

We had to take an exit exam before the office would issue our transcripts. It didn't count for our grades; it was just meant to track our improvement. It was online, so Anna and I took it at Youmoutoohana. That was our final evening at the corner table, sipping osmanthus barley tea and listening to a Japanese-accented cover of “Englishman in New York.”

At first, I thought I had been given the wrong link. The exit exam appeared to be the exact same test as the entry exam: same example sentences, same reading comprehension passages. I tried the link several times, but each time the questions looked the same.

I found the earlier questions harder this time. Before, I had clicked rapidly through whatever answers sounded right. Now I was using reason over intuition, and this cast more doubt on everything, and so when I reached the reading comprehension section I had even less time than I had on my first go. I scrolled down to that menacing wall of text, and my instinct was to shrink away.

But I had been chipping at walls of text all summer now. My eyes tracked to the first character, then the next, and on and on I slid, breaking the code bit by bit. It was all legible to me. My panic ebbed, and the story unveiled itself.

It was that letter from a student to her parents about how all the things in her room had gotten wrecked. The passage was not about a mental breakdown after all. Nor was it about a thief. She was writing to her parents about a storm. She had left the window open while she was out with her friends, and the wind had blown in and scattered all her belongings on the floor.

She only thought it was a thief. But nothing was taken. The passage was funny, not tragic. The damage had not been that bad.

I woke up one last time in the tiny apartment on Yongkang Street. Anna had left on a flight to the mainland the previous night; she was visiting her father's sister's family in Guizhou. She had confessed to me that she was dreading the trip. It would be two weeks of stifling heat in the countryside, of banquet dinners amid clouds of fruit flies and freshly slaughtered chickens; an endless procession of elders she had to greet and pretend she remembered. But at least now she could communicate. At least when people asked her what she was studying, she could say more than “math.”

I cleared out the refrigerator, which was packed with the stale onigiri left over from our typhoon stockpile. I washed the teacups one by one and placed them in the cupboard. I collected my last batch of laundry from the couch.

It was still slightly damp, but there was nothing I could do about that. I bagged up the last haul of used toilet paper and brought it downstairs to the bins. I had a long look around the place before I closed the door.

The sheets resembled a crime scene—two vibrantly clear yellow body prints of ten weeks of sweat, sunscreen, and insect repellent. We had slept here for seventy-five nights, and never once had we changed the sheets, because they were too big to stuff into the washer/dryer. I felt proud of our resilience.

Lee offered to help me arrange a cab, but I took the train. I knew the route by heart: the red line all the way to Taipei Main Station and the airport express train from there. It did add half an hour of travel time, but it was so much cheaper. On my way down the escalator I rolled my eyes at all the tourists coming up the other way, who did not know to stand on the right if they weren't going to walk.

Taipei Taoyuan International Airport to Boston Logan International Airport, by way of San Francisco.

I ate a bowl of egg yolk and scallop congee in the pre-security food court, and then I went to my gate. I had a few hundred dollars of scholarship cash left over. I wanted to spend it all on souvenirs. The rates at the airport cash exchange were exorbitant, and I didn't know if I'd ever be back to take it out of my account if I left it here. After I passed security I browsed the National Palace Museum gift shop near my gate. Teacher Cai told us about this trick on our last day of class—if you didn't have suitcase space for valuables, then check your bag and do your souvenir shopping after security. I counted my cash and chose a set of gifts that would add up almost precisely to that total: some cases of florals-infused oolong tea for my roommates, jade bookmarks for Flora, a miniature Jadeite Cabbage sculpture for Jasmine, and a set of porcelain teacups for my parents.

The woman at the counter asked if I had come back to visit family, and I explained I had come to study Chinese.

“Whatever for?” she asked. “Your Chinese is excellent.”

I demurred, using the standard phrase my parents had taught me long ago for accepting compliments: Chinese text, which literally meant, “Where? Where?” Where is the excellent Chinese? Not here.

I knew my Chinese was not good. I still couldn't read prose with the ease I wanted, and I couldn't interpret at something like a business conference without extensive preparation. Perhaps I sounded fluent in everyday conversation, but even that wouldn't last.

I was less than twenty-four hours out of the classroom, and I could already feel the dissolution of my newly formed synapses. I was still reviewing my flash cards, but the terms felt pointless out of context. Did it matter now that I knew the term for nuclear fission? For pouring old wine into new jugs?

Still, I treasured the memory of that fluency. I had felt it here, briefly. I knew it was possible. If I came back, if I kept trying, if I sank into this life again, if I put myself under such insane discipline, it was possible I could get it back.

When I arrived at my gate, I saw that the same two students were on my return flight—the girl who had been wearing the Harvard sweater and the boy she'd been flirting with. I hadn't seen them all summer. Taipei was not so tiny after all; our paths had never crossed.

They were standing very close together. I couldn't tease out their relationship. They weren't strangers to each other anymore, but they didn't seem like a couple either.

There was a casual physical intimacy between them that hadn't been there before. She leaned toward him to make a joke. He laughed and mussed her hair.

They looked different. The phrase “gone native” came to mind. The boy had bleached his hair a bright copper. The girl wore loose baggy pants, perhaps even the very pair I had seen on display in the Japanese atelier on Yongkang Street.

The girl caught me watching them. Her gaze lingered on me a moment, and it seemed she recognized me too. I wondered if the same questions were going through her head—whether I'd had the same summer itinerary, whether I was judging them, whether I was visiting Boston or coming home. I knew they hadn't attended my program, which meant they must have done one of the easier programs. I tried to feel superior about this but couldn't.

The flight attendant asked me what I would like to drink in English, and when I responded in Chinese, the words felt forced. I had gone back to pretending, the way I pretended at Chinese restaurants. All the other conversations around me were happening in English. I was on a plane full of returnees: immigrant parents and children come back to visit family for the summer.

The Harvard girl and her friend were in the row just behind me. They were talking about how to maintain their Chinese throughout the year. The boy was applying to graduate fellowships in the fall, and he wasn't sure whether he had the time for a full-credit language course. They talked about hiring tutors, how much this would cost, whether they could get university funding for it, whether the cheaper online tutoring platforms were legitimate, whether those tutors even had teaching credentials. The girl had looked into pen pal sites, but they seemed sketchy, and she wasn't sure whether they were a front for sex trafficking.

I too had looked at my course catalog for the fall semester to see how I could keep up my language skills. But I had advanced past the level where I could take the intensive daily courses, and the only classes I could register for now were content classes. I could read excerpts of early twentieth-century Chinese novels or do a study in East Asian martial arts cinema.

These seemed interesting, but they couldn't come close to the level of immersion I'd enjoyed here. I was going back to a world of English. Chinese would again be a siloed, classroom language: confined to just seventy-five minutes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

The girl from Harvard and her friend were now talking about how they hoped to come back to Taipei soon. Maybe over the winter? Maybe spring break? Sometime when it wasn't so stinking hot.

They had to seize the opportunity, because what if China invaded Taiwan and it wasn't free anymore? The president didn't care about protecting Taiwan. The president didn't even know where Taiwan was. Xi Jinping was emboldened, America had given up on primacy in the Asia-Pacific, and now the missiles might start flying at any moment. All jokes until it was real.

The guy said maybe he'd do Beijing next year because Princeton had a good program there, and the girl said, “Maybe, but what if they start taking Americans hostage?” But they weren't journalists, or drug dealers, or the children of C.E.O's-did that mean they were safe? They debated the safety of entering the mainland over the next five years. They talked about the differences between Simplified and Traditional characters. The guy thought that Simplified must be so easy to learn after one was fluent in Traditional, and he was glad he had studied in Taipei, which had retained the real Chinese culture, that is, the pre–Cultural Revolution Chinese culture.

It had been a wonderful summer, they agreed. They wanted to come back. They hoped they could, it would be such a dream, but they weren't sure they could manage.

I understood why. Summers were precious resources. Summers were for research positions or consulting internships or nonprofit work.

You had to have extensive summer experience if you were to graduate and find a job, and no one would hire you if you had spent all your summers studying a foreign language. I had learned about the concept of comparative advantage in an economics class last fall. Trade was better for everyone if all countries produced only whatever they were the best at, even if another country was objectively better at producing that thing.

So by that logic, American students should stick with their comparative advantage of being good at English and leave the jobs that demanded fluent Chinese to the people who had grown up speaking Chinese. These students were used to being good at things. They had to be in comfortable territory, somewhere they weren't always on the back foot, struggling to keep up, asking their interlocutors to repeat themselves and blinking to pretend they understood.

I knew of plenty of recent graduates now working in Asia, and of course there were certain things about their expat status—their Western degrees, their native American accents, the cultural cachet that came with a U.S passport—that cushioned their lives. Still, it seemed like such an uphill battle. Speaking a language wasn't a generative skill, like playing the guitar or crafting furniture. It didn't make you special in any way; your Chinese didn't count for more just because it was harder to obtain. Learning Chinese just made you halfway competent in a life that millions of other people were already living.

But maybe these two could make that leap. Maybe they would become foreign service officers, or naval intelligence officers, or doctoral students researching Hakka folk songs in the mountains. Maybe they would start their own educational consulting firms.

Maybe they would find Taiwanese partners and start families. Or maybe they would simply pass their university foreign language requirements, stop wasting credits on Chinese language classes, and move on with their lives. Taiwan would be an anecdote, kept in back pockets for dinner parties.

Did you know that in Taipei—? That in Chinese—? That one year I—. The food is so—. When my Chinese was better. When I went back.

In any case, I hoped they'd had a good summer.