Chapter 1 #3
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 學海無涯, which meant “the sea of learning has no limits.” I understood this was supposed 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 ROTC.
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 PLA—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 放牛吃草. 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.
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 繼續 and 截斷, and I was so happy these teachers agreed.