Chapter 2 #5
She was not respecting the bed. We had agreed that we would not get into the bed without showering first, since due to the sweat and the mosquito repellent, we were covered in various oils all the time.
I clung fastidiously to this rule, but Anna regularly came home from class and flopped over, facedown, atop the comforter.
“It’s just the top,” she said, in the same tone some guys would say “It’s just the tip.
” I tried to explain why it still mattered, but she didn’t believe me, and now the bed was covered in yellow, Anna-shaped stains.
She had bought a pair of leather sandals, and she for whatever reason always brought these leather sandals inside, so that they stank up the entire room. I asked her to leave her shoes in the hallway, where I left my shoes, and she told me that everyone’s feet smelled in the summer.
Every few days she complained that the food in Taipei was making her fat, that her shorts were feeling tight, and that she was going to start being careful about how much she ate.
But she didn’t want to throw away the soft drinks and taro milk breads she’d stashed in the fridge, so she kept trying to foist them off on me.
Please, she would say, eat them, someone has to.
But why should I eat them? Why didn’t it matter if I got fat?
Despite (5), she had developed a fondness for scallion nougat crackers—a popular Taiwanese snack, two savory water crackers flavored with green onion sandwiching a bit of cream.
I liked the nougat crackers too, but Anna was obsessed with them.
She brought a new box home every few days and crunched through them as she studied, leaving oily streaks all over the bed, the table, the floor.
I had witnessed her wiping her fingers along the table while she read; I had offered her a tissue, to which she had responded, “No, I’m good. ”
She left traces of herself everywhere and thought that because this was not home, it didn’t matter. But I lived here too. I would have to live here for the next seven weeks, and I was drowning in her filth, and she didn’t care.
SKIPPER HAD FOUND HIMSELF A TAIWANESE GIRLFRIEND.
HER name was Tingting. She was an engineering student at NTU, she was taking summer courses to graduate early, and she and Skipper had locked eyes at the dumpling stand in the student center.
Now I saw them together all over campus, usually walking with Skipper’s hand stuffed into Tingting’s back pocket, resting comfortably on her ass cheek.
Skipper asked me and JC, rather formally, if we would meet him and Tingting for dinner.
I was flattered that he thought of us as a unit.
We said of course, pick a time and place.
Skipper was thrilled. He told us that Tingting wanted Italian food.
She knew a place; he would text us the address.
This was how we wound up at I’m Pasta, the restaurant with that delightful nonsense sign.
Skipper and JC ordered the “beef cubes tomato pasta.” Tingting ordered the “tomato cream risotto.” I ordered the “spicy pesto vege,” which, according to the picture, came with sautéed cabbage.
Tingting had pin-straight black hair, thinly plucked eyebrows, and perfect English.
She had done summer camps in Los Angeles in high school—her parents loved California; they’d been to Disneyland three times.
She had been planning to do an exchange semester at Brown next spring, but now that she had met Skipper, she was thinking about coming to Yale instead.
Did we like New Haven? Was it true about the crime rates?
Was New Haven safe for women at night? She thought Skipper’s work with the Department of Defense was very important—she was glad more Americans were taking Taiwan’s defense needs seriously.
“I guess you’re his long-haired dictionary,” said JC.
“His what?”
“His long-haired dictionary. That’s the joke, right? You find a Chinese girlfriend when you’re abroad, and then you have a dictionary.”
“I am not a dictionary,” said Tingting. “I don’t help Skipper with his homework.”
“No offense,” said JC.
“Skipper’s Chinese is very good,” said Tingting.
“No, I’m sure it is.” JC leaned back, bemused.
Skipper lifted a beef cube to his mouth, and Tingting squeezed his hand.
I was struck by how protective they were of each other.
They sat with their bodies angled, forming a defensive wall against us—like this was a press conference, like they were daring us to make fun of them.
If only President and Madame Chiang Kai-shek had had their energy, I thought.
Then the Nationalists would have won the war.
“So they’re kind of weird, right?” said JC as we walked to the metro stop.
But I was touched. Would anyone ever love me like that?
WAS I PRETTY?
Was I pretty in Asia?
These were different questions. In America, you could be pretty with tanned skin and curves.
In Taipei, there was one beauty standard, and it beamed out at me from every store window, magazine cover, and television screen.
It was plastered to the label of every product at Watsons, every face mask and moisturizer and skin-whitening cream.
The standard was prepubescent celestial fairy: pale porcelain skin and shiny black hair; no boobs; wan, elegant smiles; toothy grins only if your teeth were platinum-white.
Sometimes a pigmented pink swipe under the eyes—just a hint of conjunctivitis.
The internet informed me that this was the douyin style of eye makeup.
The point was to look like a concubine in a Chinese drama—someone constantly at risk of assassination by a rival, or of committing suicide for failing to bear the emperor a son.
Tingting was pretty in Asia: Her ankles were slim, her wrists tiny, and her skin so pale I could trace the blue veins in her cheeks.
I kept seeing an advertisement for a women’s athletics brand all over the city: a young woman wearing a lilac running jacket, leaning against a brick wall.
Here was proof that marketing worked, because the more I encountered this ad, the more I wished I had that figure, that my body was composed only of straight lines.
The woman was grinning, but she had a hapless slouch to her shoulders.
It doesn’t matter how many weights I lift or how many miles I run, she said. Alas, I will always be this dainty.
I tried once to imitate that slouch. Something stirred inside me—a kind of submissive coquetry. Startled, I hugged my arms across my chest and kept walking.
I ASKED MARGRIT HOW YOU KNEW IF YOU WERE FALLING IN LOVE with someone.
I had just learned the relevant phrase in Modern Taiwanese Literature: to 愛上, to literally “love” + “on” someone, which in my mind looked like hanging your heart on a hook.
How did you know something was there? How did you get the other party to respond?
“I met my fiancé when we were in high school,” said Margrit.
“There was never a question of will we, won’t we.
From the first moment we met, we understood we were two halves of a whole.
So you see, I have always enjoyed a relationship of mutual infatuation.
Helmut and I feel very lucky in this regard.
We have never experienced the angst of adolescent romance.
Everything has been . . .” She made a leveling motion with her hand. “What is the word?”
“Stable,” I supplied.
“Yes! Stable. Like an economy can be stable. Anyways, this problem was resolved for me long ago.” She patted my shoulder. “I’m sorry that’s not more helpful.”
NONE OF THIS MATTERED ANYHOW, BECAUSE THE MAIN IMPEDIMENT to looking pretty was that I was always wet.
It didn’t matter whether it was raining or not.
I was wet even on the clear, bright days.
I could never tell if it was sweat or condensation, but I always wore a slick second skin.
Showering barely helped. It did get rid of the sweat, temporarily, but then it was impossible to get dry.
Anna had blown a fuse with her hair dryer during our first week, and now we were both too scared to use it.
Our towels were always damp, and our apartment was so humid that air drying never worked.
Showering just turned everything in the bathroom wet—the sink, all our toiletries, even the toilet paper, if we had not remembered to remove it from the holder and place it outside the bathroom.
The tile floor took the entire day to dry, which meant the only time the bathroom was remotely comfortable was the moment we came home from the department.
Otherwise we padded around in standing water and dried our feet as best we could on a soggy, mildewed bathmat.
I told myself I would have to simply adjust to a different state of being.
My parents were from coastal provinces; they had grown up in the heat.
Maybe over time my body would adapt to my environment and my pores would shrink and my sweat glands would dry up and my ankles would get slimmer, and I would be like the Taiwanese girls I saw on the metro wearing long sleeves on a summer day without any stains on their armpits.
The capacity for all of this was in my DNA.
But the transformation was incomplete; as it was, I felt trapped inside my skin, and all my irritations simmered underneath with nowhere to go.
ON FRIDAY, ANNA AND I TOOK THE BUS TO FEMBOOKS, A QUEER AND feminist bookstore in Gongguan.
We had been invited to a literary event by Rayer, our Marxist teaching assistant from last semester.
Rayer had emailed us earlier in the week.
She’d just remembered we were coming to Taipei.
Had we settled in all right? She was doing a presentation on queer Taiwanese fiction on Friday at eight, and she would love if we came by.