Chapter 2 #4
We got to choose any topic we wanted, but this was what I got hung up on.
I didn’t want to choose a topic that was too difficult, because then I would have to do the work of researching that essay, instead of just translating it into Chinese.
But I didn’t want to make an easy argument that I didn’t agree with just because it fit the vocabulary and grammar I currently had at my disposal.
Yet no matter how hard I tried, I kept finding my thoughts warped and flattened when I rendered them into Chinese.
It was so much easier to say “Students who are sick should not come in to class” than “With the tools of distance learning, we should be able to accommodate everyone.”
This was the problem with having access to only simple grammar. It made your thinking simple too. If I had complex clauses, then I would have used them, but we were only two lessons into our textbook.
We had to use at least three grammar structures from the current chapter in every presentation. So whatever I wrote had to express the following logic.
I would ______ rather than ______.
Whatever the case may be, ______.
Although ______, it is not necessarily ______.
I strained to focus, but the mosquito bite would not go away.
Although JC had been nice to Anna, he did not necessarily like her.
Whatever the case may be, I resolved not to care.
HALFWAY ALONG THE ROAD EMERGED AN ANNA.
She wanted to join me and JC for lunch. She didn’t give me any warning. She was just waiting there in the lobby, beaming, when I came down the stairs to meet JC.
“Oh!” I said. “Hi!”
“Oh, hey,” said JC, who had just noticed she was there.
“My one-on-one tutor is out sick today,” she explained. “Where are we going?”
We decided to try the conveyor belt sushi restaurant south of campus.
Since it was a single belt, there were no four-top tables, only one large table that spanned the middle of the restaurant.
We had to sit three in a row at the counter.
Anna and I sat on the sides, JC in the middle.
Whenever someone spoke, we had to lean or twist around to make eye contact.
And if I wanted to say something to Anna, or vice versa, then we had to lean forward against the counter and speak across JC.
This made everything seem adversarial, though I couldn’t tell if I was the only one who felt this way.
Was JC also annoyed by this intrusion? Did he also wish Anna would disappear?
Things started getting testy with the chopsticks.
Every other eating accoutrement was laid out at our seat stations—napkins, dishes for soy sauce and wasabi, and even little hot water dispensers for our tea—but the chopsticks were nowhere to be found.
Anna wanted to flag down the server, but he was so busy helping a queue of people settling up that we couldn’t get his attention.
At last, I noticed the couple across the conveyor belt extracting their chopsticks from a drawer under the table.
We crouched down, and there it was: a near-invisible line in the counter. We never could have found it ourselves.
“We should have just gotten up and asked,” said JC.
“I didn’t want to look like a foreigner,” I said.
“Right, Lily hates when people know she’s a foreigner,” said Anna.
“What’s so bad about looking like a foreigner?” JC asked.
“There’s nothing bad,” I said. “I think—I don’t know. I think I just really like trying to blend in.”
“They’re not going to treat you worse if they know you’re foreign,” said Anna. She was speaking English now; we all were, and Anna’s English voice was deeper, meaner. She never sounded so sarcastic in Chinese. “Taipei’s famously friendly.”
“I know, I’m not scared of that.” I shifted in my seat. “I just want to try living like I’m from here.”
“Lily is very insecure about her Chineseness,” Anna told JC.
But it wasn’t just about my Chineseness.
For as long as I could remember, I had loved observing how other people went about their lives.
Whenever I traveled, I liked to watch strangers on their daily routines: their commuting routes, where they went for lunch, the parks they strolled in after work, the convenience stores where they picked up disposable masks for the subway or cartons of fat-free milk for their coffee.
I liked browsing convenience stores, and I liked watching people walk through metro tunnels.
I did this at home too; in the winter especially, I loved walking down streets at night when everyone was inside, looking into each warmly lit living room as I passed.
What kind of person would I be if I lived in the home with the football pennant flags?
The nativity scenes? The enormous collection of Fellini DVDs?
I always felt a strange jealousy over even the most mundane evidence of another life—an assortment of mugs, a stack of test prep books—for no reason other than that life was not mine.
I tried to articulate all this to JC and Anna. “Haven’t you ever wanted to slip into someone else’s life? Just for a few minutes, just to see what it’s like?”
“Not really,” said Anna. “I’m happy with who I am. I mean, we’re pretty lucky to live these lives, all considered.”
“No, I’m happy with my life too! I just get so curious about other people.
Like—it feels so unfair that we only get to live once, and we only get to experience the world from one perspective.
I think about this with other bodies too.
Other genders, or bodies very different from mine.
Yours, for instance.” I looked over at JC.
“I’d like to know what it’s like to live as you for a few hours. ”
“This feels like a sex thing,” said JC.
“It’s really not a sex thing. Well—I guess maybe, it could be a sex thing, but not the way I think about it. I’m just curious. What does the world look like if you’re tall? Or if you have hair in places that I don’t? Or if your limbs are just stronger, or longer, like yours?”
“That’s very flattering, go on,” said JC.
“Stop flirting,” said Anna.
We both pretended not to hear her. JC put his hand under his chin, shifting ever so slightly toward me. “But couldn’t you just try it?”
“Try what?”
“Moving here, becoming Taiwanese. Your Chinese is so good already, you could just see what it’s like, couldn’t you?”
“I mean—I’d like to.” I had been thinking about it.
Something felt different about Taipei. In every other country I’d ever visited, people-watching had been mere fantasy.
It would have taken divine intervention to blend into Germany, for instance; I could only become someone named Heide or Anneliese if I had been born an entirely different person.
But in Taipei, I had the raw materials, so to speak.
It would be very difficult. It would demand starting over—not only with my citizenship, my school enrollment, my bank account, my primary care doctor, but with the whole socialization process, coming into being in a different language.
But there would be such pleasure in this.
I would be introduced to a whole new world of culture: new children’s books to read, series to become obsessed with, television shows to watch.
My first year in college I had mourned that I couldn’t be entertained by my favorite books like I used to—it seemed everything was stale, that my best adventures were over.
But I could have a second adolescence in Chinese.
And as my fluency increased, I had intensifying fantasies about my doppelg?nger in Taipei: a person who didn’t have to regain her Chinese but had rather always had it; a parallel self who was unburdened with my inadequacies, who did not repeat halting greetings to her grandparents over video, who did not have to tentatively ask her parents if today was perhaps a holiday but had celebrated Lunar New Year her whole life at home with a large, happy family.
“I don’t know,” said Anna. “I think that’s kind of judgmental.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Like, why hide who you are? You’re not Taiwanese, you’re American; you’re just like the rest of us.”
“That’s not what I was trying to say.”
“But that’s just how you act here. You get so embarrassed if we do anything wrong. You’re literally always going on about it. Like the other day, you actually snapped at me for not sorting out the recycling.”
I felt Anna was being very aggressive for no reason. “They care a lot about recycling here.”
“It was just a used tissue, it wasn’t the end of the world.”
JC’s head kept swiveling between us. He sensed, we both sensed, that the dynamic had polarized. He had been asked to judge between us, like Paris and the goddesses, and that was ridiculous, and it was all Anna’s fault.
Diplomatically he said, “I think it’s pretty natural to want to blend in where you are. It’s like a survival mechanism, right?”
“I guess.” Anna shrugged.
“Right.” I wished they’d just change the subject. JC hadn’t understood me either—not at all.
THAT AFTERNOON AS I WALKED HOME, I THOUGHT ABOUT ALL THE reasons why I didn’t like Anna.
Over the past three weeks I had accumulated quite a number of grievances. This was perhaps less mature than just telling her about them when they came up, but reviewing them made me feel righteous. If ever the matter went to court—boy, did I have charges.
Anna always crammed for her vocabulary quizzes early in the morning, and she did this by repeating all of her new terms at full volume, overenunciating every tone like she was singing in the Peking opera, even though she knew I was trying to sleep.
I was fairly certain that she was peeing in the shower, although we had both agreed not to do this. She promised she wasn’t, but I smelled it sometimes—a faint ammonia lingering in the air.