Chapter 2
Courtesy of the author
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 JC 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.
JC 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 denied 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 clung around 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 JC, 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.