Chapter 3
Courtesy of the author
The rain broke at last. We woke to warm sunlight on our faces, and Anna made me get up early so that we could walk around across the street to get steamed buns and soy milk for breakfast.
“I like Taipei again,” Anna sang. “I like my life again.”
The steamed buns were pillowy and sweet.
The soy milk came scooped out of a wooden tub, and scratched my throat in a pleasant, grainy way.
I must be kinder to Anna, I told myself.
She had a crush, and that was embarrassing, but she was essentially a sweet person.
The sunlight made this easier to remember.
I watched her nibbling her steamed bun and felt a wave of affection—the kind I would feel for a small woodland animal.
Anna left for class and I stayed at home, waiting for the laundry machine to unlock so I could hang up our clothes. I was still lounging in bed when the floor began to shake.
Something clattered inside the bathroom.
I sat up, baffled. I touched my fingers to my face.
I could feel the vibrations in my jaw. An earthquake?
But I didn’t remember what I was supposed to do during an earthquake.
Something about doorways, or getting outside—which one was it?
The sidewalks were so narrow; what if the buildings toppled onto me?
What was worse: being crushed by rubble, or suffocating slowly in a little pocket of air?
I kept thinking of a viral video about a bed designed to withstand earthquakes by transforming into a metal cage.
What good would that do?, derided the comments.
Produce a steel coffin? Where you could languish for days, slowly dying from lack of food and water?
The shaking continued. I saw the water trembling in my glass—visual evidence; this was not in my head. I decided that I had time to escape. I snatched up my phone and keys and dashed down the stairs, and I had just opened the door to the outside when the tremors stopped.
I stepped barefoot into the street. Outside was bright, bewilderingly normal.
Across the street, the jianbing vendor was pouring batter onto her stovetop, and a line of customers stretched around the corner, checking their phones, counting their change.
Yongkang Street was crowded as always: couples walking hand in hand, mothers pushing strollers, vendors wrapping up takeout in plastic bags. Nothing looked out of place.
Was I the only one who had felt it? I wandered down the sidewalk, unsure if I was dreaming. I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my right calf. I had left the building without spraying Off!
I went back inside. I sat on the bed and googled “Earthquake, Taipei,” but all the top results were articles from last April about how Taipei 101 had not collapsed despite a series of recent earthquakes.
I tried the search in Chinese, but that also turned up nothing.
How could this be? Could I have been the only one to feel the earthquake? Could earthquakes be so targeted?
My phone buzzed—JC was calling. I answered at once. “Are you okay?”
“What?”
“Did you feel the earthquake?”
“Sorry, what?”
“The earthquake just now, did you—?”
“So here’s the situation.” JC didn’t seem to have heard me. “You know the Beitou resort reservation?”
“Huh?”
“So I thought it was booked for Saturday, but I read the dates on the deal wrong, and it turns out it’s actually for today. Like, this afternoon.”
“Oh,” I said. It took my thoughts a moment to catch up—I was still wondering how this was related to the earthquake. “Okay?”
“So do you still want to go?”
I almost pointed out that I had class today. But JC must have known this, because JC also had class every weekday, so clearly the question was whether I wanted to skip class with him.
“You can’t just change the booking?”
“No, it’s like a limited deal, so there aren’t refunds.”
“But Anna already left for class.”
“Can you text her or something?” JC sounded impatient. “Maybe she can join us after.”
“I mean, she’s probably in class now.” I knew Anna kept her phone in her locker during the day; there was no way I could reach her until her lunch break. “Can we wait until after class?”
“I think it won’t make sense to go that late in the day. We wouldn’t even get there until after dark, and then it wouldn’t be worth it.”
“I see.”
It occurred to me that perhaps JC didn’t want Anna to come—that perhaps her absence was the point. But did I want to go if Anna had been excluded on purpose? And if JC didn’t want Anna there, then why did he want me?
“So I would like to go,” said JC. “I think the experience will be worth it. And I’d really like you to go too, but I think you should decide pretty quick if we’re going to have a good time.” All this he said in a light and even tone, though it still seemed like he was annoyed with me.
I tried to sort out what would be more offensive: going or not going.
I didn’t want to ditch Anna. The trip now felt forced and stressful, not fun and spontaneous.
On the other hand, it seemed rude to turn JC down when he had already paid for the reservation.
There was no middle ground here, no option that preserved every relationship the way it had been.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, let’s go.”
WE AGREED TO MEET ON THE RED LINE IN HALF AN HOUR. JC WAS coming from one station over, and he texted me that he was in one of the middle cars. When the train arrived, he stepped out and waved, and I ran to his door. Rush hour was over. We had an entire row of seats to ourselves.
“Hi,” he said.
I sat down beside him and tucked my bag in between my legs. I had brought all my textbooks, just in case there was downtime—in case I got bored. “Hi.”
“Sorry for the mix-up.”
“No, that’s okay. Did you feel the earthquake this morning?”
“Huh?”
“It was so crazy,” I said. “I was lying in bed and then I felt the apartment floor moving, and then things started falling off the shelf in my bathroom.”
JC frowned. “I didn’t feel anything.”
“Maybe it was just in my neighborhood?”
“Let’s check.” JC took out his phone. “There’s a government website that tracks earthquakes.” He showed me his screen—the last reported earthquake had been more than two months ago. “Yeah, nothing.”
“Weird,” I said. “Maybe they haven’t updated it.”
“Or maybe you dreamed it?”
“I can’t have,” I said. “My stuff fell off the bathroom shelf. I saw.”
“Huh.” JC watched me for a while, then shrugged.
I leaned forward on the bench, staring at my knees.
Why was I the only one who cared about this earthquake? Didn’t anyone want to know the truth?
I felt very unsettled. Several events had occurred in rapid succession, all of them unexpected, and I didn’t know what to do with that. This day was veering out of control. I had no say in anything. Things would end up how they would end up and I would just accept the consequences.
I was having a hard time processing that this was real: that I was on a train next to JC, that we were going to spend the next two days together, alone.
I thought of the party scene in Lost, when the protagonist makes eyes at the Western flapper girl, and then they go off to have sex, just like that.
I felt suspended in a state of narrative disbelief, as if by virtue of being in Taipei, my life had become a film where anything could happen at any time.
I could make eyes at someone, and that would be it; no deliberation, no fretting about whether he liked me back or even knew I existed.
We would just go off and have sex, and then we could sit in separate corners and ponder what this meant about our national identities, our relationship to modernity, and our complicity in colonialism.
“Do you think we should write in and ask for an excused absence?” JC asked.
This was a joke. He had used the Chinese term for taking a leave of absence: 請假. A funny phrase, because 請 could also mean to invite someone. So in one sense, you weren’t asking for leave, you were inviting someone to give you a break.
“Ha ha,” I said.
“No but actually, should we tell the teachers we’re going?”
“Probably?” I felt a surge of anxiety. I’d never broken the rules with such brazen indifference. I didn’t know what the consequences would be. Suspension? Expulsion? Death?
What were we doing here? JC and I had met only a month ago.
We were not close friends. I worried that this trip was in fact a mutual dare that neither of us could back out of, a fifty-dollar sunk cost, and we were only going along with it because the booking already existed, and to not go would be more socially destabilizing than just accepting our fates.
But what were those fates? What was scripted to happen in Beitou?
The obvious promise of sex hung between us, but so far JC had made no indication that he liked me that way.
When boys wanted to have sex with me, I had learned, they would initiate proceedings by finding excuses to touch me: hand to hand, skin to skin, an arm creeping around my shoulders.
But JC just sat next to me, hunched over his phone as if we were strangers.
It looked like he was playing a game involving slingshots.
I pulled out my own phone and started going through my vocabulary flash cards for the week.
“Hello!” I didn’t realize the old woman sitting across from us was talking to me. She said it again, more forcefully, and I glanced up.
She pointed to my water bottle. “You can’t eat or drink on the subway.”
I had known about the no eating or drinking rule. I just assumed it had to do with a mask mandate, which no one was obeying at this point, or with cleanliness, which seemed to exclude water.
“Even water?”
She sighed loudly—more loudly than I felt the situation warranted—and stood up. I shrank back—I thought she was going to grab my bottle from me—but she walked over to the middle of the car and rapped her knuckles against a poster on the wall. “See here. There’s a fine.”
I wasn’t even drinking anymore. “Okay.”