Chapter 1 #5
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 JC.
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 JC, whose accent was suspiciously bad, though he should have been a native speaker.
Anna and I were at the top. 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!” JC 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 US 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 we all 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.