Chapter 1 #7
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.
花生, I would remember, too late. Peanuts were 花生, 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.
JC 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:
In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War. This was good or bad depending on whether you were a Communist.
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.
2a. 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 UN 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 “TAs 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-size 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.