Chapter 2 #3
I too had noticed the black specks swimming across the floor of the shower area. I had assumed Anna was tracking them into the apartment. I knew I wasn’t, because I always took off my shoes at the door.
“I’m not leaving black specks,” I said.
“Then where are they coming from?”
“Maybe they were already under the door. Maybe the water is drawing them out.”
“It’s been two weeks,” she said. “The specks are not still seeping out from under the door.”
Still there were specks, and for the next few days, Anna would sigh dramatically in the bathroom as she mopped them up.
The sighs made me resentful. If she were a mature adult, I thought, she would just open the door and tell me she’d found more specks.
I formulated this opinion in Chinese according to the sentence structure I had learned that morning: X ought to Y.
Mature adults ought to communicate their grievances with direct, firm speech, not sigh dramatically in bathrooms.
ANNA WAS IN A BAD MOOD BECAUSE SHE HAD JUST RETURNED FROM lunch with one of her mother’s friends from college.
Anna had met this woman only once before, when she was three, but there was enough of a familial connection that Anna had to address her as “Auntie Wen” and take three connecting trains across the city to meet her at her convenience.
They had eaten at a high-end dim sum place inside a hotel.
Auntie Wen was not even staying at this hotel.
She had just booked the lunch there, because it was so fancy.
When Auntie Wen saw Anna, she exclaimed that she had gained weight.
“Which was an insane thing to say,” said Anna, “because the last time she saw me I was three feet tall.” Then Auntie Wen had ordered nearly everything on the menu, urged Anna to try it all, and spent the next two hours asking Anna very targeted questions about her family—specifically, about her younger brother, Victor.
Anna explained that Victor was a sensitive subject for her family because of his undiagnosed ADHD, which made him incapable of completing any of his coursework.
“He has attention problems,” said Anna. “He can’t look at a textbook for more than a minute; it makes him want to cry.
” Victor was dependably a B and C student, which to Anna’s parents was as bad as being a drug dealer.
Anna had been lobbying her parents to get him some Adderall for years, but they didn’t believe in Western medication, as this would be an admission of defeat.
Now Anna felt guilty. She had revealed too much: No one was supposed to know about Victor’s ADHD, or his poor grades. It was like admitting he had syphilis. Now Auntie Wen might spread this news across China, and soon enough everyone would know that Victor was incapable of doing his homework.
“But you don’t even know if it’s ADHD,” I said.
“Everyone and their mom has ADHD,” said Anna. “What else could it be?”
Anna explained that her mother and Auntie Wen had competed for the same scholarship as undergraduates in China, and that her mother had won funding to go to the United States for graduate study, and Auntie Wen hadn’t.
An American visa was a source of great envy at the time.
Auntie Wen was wealthy now and could hire a private driver to take her across Taipei to eat in a restaurant inside a hotel.
But still Auntie Wen had to take Anna’s mother down a peg.
My parents had their own rivals who liked to call me fat, so I understood the situation.
I asked whether the food was good at least, and Anna shrugged.
“It was impressive,” she said. “They gave us a basket of golden pears, except they weren’t pears.
They were deep-fried sesame balls that looked like pears—they even had a little twig of chocolate to resemble a stem.
And there were steamed sesame buns that looked like mushrooms, and slices of mushroom seared to resemble steaks. ”
Auntie Wen had kept quizzing Anna on which foods were real or fake.
Did she see the resemblance? Was she fooled?
In Taiwan, it seemed, gourmet cuisine involved making foods look like other foods.
Auntie Wen had asked Anna whether any chefs in America could achieve imitations like this, and Anna told her about a pastry chef she followed on Instagram who could make cake look like everyday objects—even a shoe, or a toilet bowl.
Those cakes were startlingly realistic. She’d shown Auntie Wen a video in which the pastry chef’s boyfriend tried to turn the door handle to their apartment, only to discover it was actually cake.
Auntie Wen had not found this so impressive.
IN MODERN TAIWANESE LITERATURE, MEIJUAN ANNOUNCED A CRUCIAL discovery: She had figured out why restaurants kept telling her the dishes she wanted to order weren’t vegetarian, when they were clearly made without meat.
They wouldn’t even give her sautéed broccoli.
It turned out that in Taipei, being vegetarian often indicated that you were Buddhist, and many Buddhists didn’t eat garlic, onions, or chilis because they were “pungent spices”—flavors that could impede meditation and arouse the passions because they were so exciting.
The problem was that almost everything that tasted good was made with garlic, onions, or chilis.
So for several weeks, Meijuan had been living on steamed buns and bananas, because she couldn’t get any other vegetarian food.
The rub was that Meijuan was also a Buddhist. She just didn’t think eating garlic would make her horny.
THE SECRET TO SUCCEEDING IN THOUGHT AND SOCIETY WAS USING lots of chengyu.
Chengyu were idiomatic, typically four-character phrases that often invoked a folktale or an allusion to a classic text.
For instance: 畫蛇添足, to add feet to a drawing of a snake.
The story behind this involved a contest between two artists.
They were trying to see who could paint the best snake.
One artist quickly finished his painting, got bored, and then ruined it by adding unnecessary details like feet.
You could use this chengyu in all sorts of contexts: critiquing an essay, or making fun of someone’s outfit.
But you had to be careful not to confuse it with another chengyu: 畫龍點睛, to paint a dragon and dot its eyes.
In this case, the extra details were a good thing.
Dotting the eyes helped the dragon come to life and fly away.
Using chengyu was like using SAT vocabulary: The more you used, the smarter you sounded.
In our class, spitting out a chengyu at a moment’s notice was like doing a back handspring across the desks.
Everyone gasped and applauded. Why was the job market tough for new graduates?
Because there were many monks, and only a little porridge.
Why was health care so expensive in the United States?
Because wolves and jackals had colluded, to the disadvantage of all.
We loved deploying a well-placed chengyu. It made Teacher Cai so happy.
Occasionally, chengyu were longer than four characters.
Teacher Cai taught us a really good one: 半路殺出個程咬金, halfway along the road emerges a Cheng Yaojin.
Cheng Yaojin was a reckless, bumbling Tang-dynasty general known for showing up randomly and saving the day.
This wasn’t necessarily a good thing. You didn’t want Cheng Yaojin showing up, swinging his ax around without first assessing the situation. He ruined all your plans.
“DO YOU THINK JC IS INTO ME?” ASKED ANNA.
I was so surprised by this question that I almost laughed. JC? Anna? When? But she really meant it. Her face was open, earnest. I had to rearrange my features into a careful, neutral expression before I could respond.
“Why do you think that?”
“Last weekend, I don’t know. I thought I felt something.” Anna twirled her pen. “You eat lunch with him, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So you could perhaps mention me? Examine the . . .” She wanted to say “vibe,” I could tell, but there was no equivalent in Chinese. “Examine the situation?”
I didn’t know why I hated the prospect. I had put no thought into attempting a romantic attachment with JC myself; it seemed so wildly out of reach. So I couldn’t be jealous; we weren’t competing. But still, the sight of Anna’s wide, hopeful eyes made me squirm.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That feels kind of awkward.”
“Just be subtle—like, see if I come up. Or we could all go out to a café sometime after class. Would you suggest that to him?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Maybe this week?”
“I’ll try.” I tugged my laptop closer to me. I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. The thought of the two of them together gave me a weird itch in my side, like a mosquito bite that I couldn’t scratch. JC, walking hand in hand with Anna—no, some things were just not meant to be.
I tried to focus on my presentation. Each week we had to write an essay for Thought and Society, correct it with our one-on-one tutor, and then present it to our classmates.
The essays had to be eight hundred words in length.
I kept writing half a sentence, highlighting the whole document, and checking the word count.
Somehow I was freshly disappointed when it grew in increments of only five or ten words.