Chapter 3 #2
“So you have to put that away.”
People were staring. Even the woman’s husband seemed embarrassed about this exchange. He kept glancing up at us and then down at his shoes.
JC squeezed my wrist. I tugged my arm away. I felt everyone was being a bit overfamiliar today.
“Hey.” The woman was waving to me again. Reluctantly, I glanced up. She asked, “Where are you going?”
I looked over at JC, who said, “Beitou.”
“Beitou! Why are you going to Beitou?”
“We’re looking at the hot springs.”
“Beitou,” she told her husband, as if this were ludicrous—as if they’d never in their entire lives met anyone going to Beitou.
I couldn’t tell if he heard her. No matter what she said, he just kept staring forward with that impassive stare unique to old Chinese men.
“They’re looking at hot springs. On a day like this. ”
Her husband grunted. I folded my arms and pulled them tight against my chest. No one in the car spoke for the rest of the ride.
BEITOU LOOKED JUST LIKE THE RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS IN central Taipei, except a bit older, a bit shabbier.
In my imagination I had built up the resort town to resemble a theme park, with water slides and splashing children, but we saw none of these as we dragged our bags across town from the station.
The resort hotel was such a nondescript brown building that we walked back and forth past it several times before we finally found the sign on the door.
The reception desk was empty. JC rang the bell, and several minutes passed before a young woman emerged from a back room. She seemed baffled by our presence.
“Hi,” JC said, in Chinese.
“Checking in?” she asked, in English.
They battled for a moment—clearly she wanted to prove her fluency in English, and JC wanted to prove his fluency in Chinese—but he didn’t know the words for “promotional deal,” and so she won out.
Yes, our reservation was valid. Yes, the discount was still good.
Yes, our room was ready. The hotel restaurant was on the second floor, and dinner service began at half past five.
“Are the indoor springs open now?” asked JC.
“Of course,” said the receptionist. “They’re open every day from ten to eight.
But the hotel hot springs are divided between men and women.
The men’s are on the second floor, and the women’s are on the third floor.
You are free to enter the hot springs whenever you wish, but you cannot go in together. ”
This made good sense to me, because sometimes hot springs were nude-only, and it seemed very transgressive to have men and women cavorting nude in the same space together. But JC looked so disappointed. “There’s no unisex pool?”
“Not at this hotel, no.”
“What about at the public hot springs?”
“The public springs have the same rules,” said the receptionist. “They’re like that everywhere.”
“So we can’t go to any hot springs together at all?”
The receptionist glanced at me, then let out a nervous giggle. “There is a private tub in your room, and the water comes straight from the springs.”
I tried to nonverbally communicate that I did not share JC’s urgent desire to soak in a hot spring together. But I could read the judgment on her face. She knew what was going on here.
OUR ROOM WAS MUCH SMALLER THAN IT HAD APPEARED IN THE photo.
What had seemed to be an enormous sitting area turned out to be a narrow hallway, and there was no king-size bed, only the smallest double I’d ever seen.
This seemed like a recurring scam in Taipei, and somehow I kept falling for it.
There was no way we could have slept comfortably if Anna had come.
Someone would have ended up on the floor.
“Give me a second.” JC set down his backpack, dug out his toiletries bag, and went into the bathroom.
I perched on the edge of the bed, trying to decide how I wanted the rest of this day to go.
I had never once gone on a successful date in my life.
I always broke down at the communication stage, even with people I liked.
I couldn’t answer basic questions, like whether I wanted to sit on the booth side or the seat side, or whether I wanted still or sparkling water.
I never struggled to express myself on these topics in any other contexts, but once it was a date, the stakes always felt so high.
It was like I had to pass an interview where the standard was proving I was a nice and normal person.
I was even worse at the business of making conversation, at getting to know the other person.
None of my interlocutor’s questions were ever interesting, and none of my responses communicated anything about who I was or how I liked to spend my time.
The conversation always spun into strangely boring directions, while I struggled to work out what a normal person might say on topics such as music, culture, and philosophical attitudes toward life.
The problem was that I never wanted to know whether someone had siblings and pets, or how much they had disliked growing up in the suburbs.
I wanted to know what they would do if they were a gladiator in the Colosseum, and the Colosseum was flooded, and they had to fight a shark.
When I had been preparing for college admissions interviews, my guidance counselor had told me it could be helpful to write down a list of traits that I wanted my interviewers to remember about me.
We generated a list of those traits together; at least, I let her tell me what traits I should try to have.
We decided that I should try to come off as curious, diligent, and responsible.
I never forgot that advice. I kept coming back to it during freshman orientation weekend, when I was trying to make a good impression on everyone I met.
I wanted to give bookish, literary, and thoughtful, but it was hard to communicate all this through icebreakers.
At the end of the fall semester, my roommate confessed to me that she thought I gave off cold and indifferent vibes.
That had horrified me. Indifferent! When I was frightened to death that no one liked me!
I didn’t want to give JC this same impression, but I couldn’t decide what qualities I wanted him to attach to me until I knew how I wanted him to treat me, and what I wanted this relationship to become, but this in turn depended on what kind of person I thought I was—that is, whether I was the kind of girl who would engage in a relationship, sexual or not, with JC.
I thought maybe this was what my English professor had meant when he kept talking about the hermeneutic circle.
All this was going through my head while JC was in the bathroom, doing things that involved the clinking of bottles and the rapid turning on and turning off of the sink.
My trait would be easy, I decided. Sweet, accommodating, and up for anything. If I could just get through the rest of this day without irritating JC, I would count this a success.
“Okay.” JC emerged from the bathroom. He was wearing an eye-watering quantity of body spray, and he had done something to his hair so that it was now sticking up in the front.
“So. Do you want to try one of the public springs?” He pulled his swim trunks out of his bag.
“I think we can sneak around the gender thing if there’s not a lot of people around. ”
I had not brought a swimsuit. The idea of a swimsuit had never even crossed my mind. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“It’s off season; I really don’t think anyone will care.”
“I just don’t want to get in trouble.”
“Jeez, Anna’s right.” I flinched. “You are obsessed with blending in.”
“I mean—I just want to respect the local customs.”
“Fine, then what do you want to do instead?”
I saw now I was in a terrible position. Distracted as I had been with Anna, I had not put any effort into planning this Beitou trip.
I had assumed that when we showed up, the attractions would just materialize in front of us, the way they always had on any group excursion.
Now we had no itinerary, and the one thing JC had clearly wanted to do was off the table.
It was still early in the day. I had to spend at least eight hours with JC before we could plausibly call it a night and go to sleep.
The only thing I knew about Beitou was that it was famous for its hot springs.
I had no idea what else the town had to offer.
“Maybe we could just walk around,” I said. “Like, explore the resort area, and then explore the town center. Let’s just see where the road takes us?”
“Fine,” said JC. “Okay. Fine.”
OUTSIDE, WE FOLLOWED THE ROAD SIGNS UP THE HILL TO THE BEITOU Geothermal Valley.
We passed about a dozen hot springs resorts along the way.
They all looked fancier than ours, and we both pretended not to notice.
Everywhere I looked, there were street stands hawking hard-boiled eggs cooked over sulfurous gas.
We passed a little family of German tourists who seemed very excited about these eggs, though I couldn’t see how sulfurous gas could make anything taste better.
The Geothermal Valley lay behind an iron gate.
At the front of the gate was a stone fountain, from which a thick stream of bright green water trickled steadily into a basin.
A sign on the fountain explained the health benefits of this special sulfurous water: It could cure all sorts of ailments, including arthritis and cancer.
I drew my fingers idly through the stream.
I couldn’t believe this shade of green existed in nature.
I was sure someone had dribbled in some food coloring.
It was the bright green of theatrical effects, of magic potions.
But I didn’t have any ailments to cure. I was young and healthy and I had no wrinkles.
Maybe if I had leprosy or something—then I’d be really excited about this water.