Chapter 1 #4
“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 our penultimate week.
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 IDs, 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 JC.”
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 JC 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.
JC 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.
JC’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 JC 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 II.
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 (NTU’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: 老師.
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.