Chapter 3 #3
The path beyond promised us a hike through the Geothermal Valley and a better look at the sulfur mines, but the gate was locked. The park was closed today for maintenance.
JC kicked at the gate. “Why on a Friday?”
His vehemence startled me; I shrank back. “It’s okay.”
“But people come out on Fridays!” His cheeks were flushed red, and his voice carried a sudden, childish hitch. For a moment, I thought he might cry. “Why would you close it today, of all the fucking days?”
“It’s really okay.” I tugged at his arm. “We’ll just go back and look at the city, okay? We don’t have to see the springs up close.”
“Fine.”
We walked a few paces together down the path. For a while, neither of us spoke. I was embarrassed about shrinking, and JC was embarrassed about his tantrum, and we were both going mad from the heat. We had revealed too much about how circumstances made us feel, and now we had to kill ourselves.
OUR MOOD IMPROVED AS WE TURNED BACK TOWARD THE TOWN center.
The old woman on the train had been right.
Beitou in the summertime heat was punishing, and on the rocky paths near the Geothermal Valley, the sun conspired with the humidity to create a choking greenhouse atmosphere.
But nearer the main street there were trails that led through a forest, and after several silent minutes in the shade, I no longer felt that life was not worth living.
JC reached out and snaked his fingers around mine.
I had seen this coming. I had felt his hand knocking against mine for the last few minutes, like a boat attempting to dock, so I didn’t flinch when at last he made contact.
But now I couldn’t enjoy my walk because I was so fixated on his hand.
It wasn’t any sweatier than mine, and his grip wasn’t uncomfortable.
It was just so big. My fingers were lost inside all that flesh.
And every time I moved, or tried to turn a corner, I had to be excruciatingly aware of his hand, which was of course connected to the rest of his body, and which constrained my every action.
But letting go was such a violent declaration.
Commenting on it would be even worse. Then we would break whatever truce made this walk so pleasant.
Finally JC pulled away to check the maps app on his phone, and I jammed my hands into my pockets.
HALF A MILE DOWN THE ROAD WE SAW A WOODEN SIGN POINTING toward a public spring.
JC wanted to check it out, so we followed the path until we came to a row of turnstiles.
The man at the gate said that it would cost NT$100 each for us to enter.
He glanced at us and added, “And the men’s and women’s baths are separate. ”
“We don’t want to soak in the springs,” said JC. “We just want to have a look around; can we do that?”
The old man asked him what he was looking for.
“Just looking.” JC repeated the verb, as if that were the source of confusion. I was struck with a wave of déjà vu. This was the same verb Anna had used to justify peeking through my texts: 看. “Look, look.”
Finally the old man shrugged and let us pass through the turnstiles.
The public springs, too, looked nothing like the photos from the resorts.
They just looked like public pools, except that steam curled lazily from the water’s surface.
Faded towels, foldout chairs, and plastic toys lay scattered around two circular tubs cut from stone: one for the men, one for the women.
In the men’s pool, a half dozen old, muscled grandpas sat leaning against the rim with their elbows propped against the edge.
They were wearing matching swim trunks: a navy-blue base with a pineapple print.
In the women’s pool, a cluster of fully dressed grandmas sat perched on the edge, nibbling sunflower seeds and soaking their feet.
I stifled a giggle. There was nothing erotic about this. It looked nice, actually. I wished I’d brought a swimsuit after all.
We stood awhile, until some of the old men started to gaze back, and JC said, “Let’s keep moving.”
THEN EMERGED FROM THE TREES A SIGHT THAT MADE THIS WHOLE journey worth it: a three-story building of gleaming wood, all clean lines and bright lights, wooden banisters wrapping around floor-to-ceiling windows.
A museum? An art gallery? We wandered closer.
It was the public library. I tried the doors, but they were locked.
A sign on the window apologized that the library was closed for renovations.
“Damn it.” I pressed my forehead against the window glass. I could just imagine walking through those stacks: cool air, cool wood, and crisp, waiting books.
“Very Zen atmosphere,” said JC. “It looks Japanese.”
As we turned back into town, I discovered that lots of things in Beitou looked Japanese: the teahouses, the Hot Spring Museum, and especially the old train station, which had once been called the Shin-hokutō Station and was now a museum.
This made sense, since most of these buildings had been constructed during the Japanese colonial era.
The Japanese had loved Beitou—they’d been delighted to find thermal springs so far from home.
I was starting to get a sense of what made a building design look distinctively Japanese: an elegant wooden frame, a sloped roof, and a certain meticulousness about the rocks and foliage in the landscaping.
Japanese architecture struck me as intensely deliberate, as if someone had sought divine permission before placing each stone in the foundation.
It was less clear to me how to define classical Chinese architecture, except that it seemed gaudier and always involved a lot of red.
I still hadn’t figured out the general Taiwanese attitude toward Japan.
It did seem quite different from the general mainlander attitude toward Japan, where no amount of time could erase the hatred of the Japanese.
I had grown up watching war dramas with my father.
These dramas were thirty or forty episodes long, and they arrived in our mailbox in plastic-wrapped box sets.
They were all about wholesome country girls who fell in love with wholesome country boys until the Japanese came and raped the country girls and massacred their families, and then the country boys went down in a heroic spray of bullets.
My father was from a village formerly occupied by the Japanese, and every time we returned he made us look at the bullet holes they’d left in the walls of his old home.
He could quote exactly one line from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and it was “I despise the goddamn Japs!”
My parents were not unique in this. My friend Elaine was from Nanjing and her boyfriend, Ethan, was from South Korea, and because of various Japanese war crimes in Nanjing and South Korea, neither of their parents had permitted them to visit Japan growing up.
Over spring break Elaine told her parents she and Ethan were joining a group trip to Tokyo, and her father had shaken his head, sighed, and said, “I suppose your generation is different.”
However, as Teacher Sun had explained it, Taiwan’s colonial experience under Japan was much better than South Korea’s or mainland China’s.
According to her, the Japanese had trod more lightly and brought modernization and education to the Taiwanese.
Many older Taiwanese people had learned Japanese as their first written language and still found it easier to read Japanese than Mandarin.
Compared to the chaos and brutal repression of martial rule under the Nationalists, they remembered the era of Japanese occupation as one of relative peace, prosperity, law, and order.
This seemed like a reductive way of understanding things, but the cultural evidence was apparent.
I saw the ghosts of Japan everywhere, from the spare architectural lines to the omakase restaurants to the ubiquitous Japanese translations to the casual linguistic remnants I heard on the street.
Sumimasen. Ojiisan, obaasan. And I had noticed that at shops, when clerks handed change back, the polite thing was to receive it with both hands and give a little bow.
So what defined this relationship? Nostalgia? Resentment?
I had no framework for making sense of this.
In all my history classes, we were taught that colonialism was bad and self-determination was good.
The Japanese had once colonized Taiwan, so surely this meant that the Japanese were bad.
But Taiwan hadn’t achieved self-determination when the Japanese left.
There was no decolonial transition here.
Instead, a defeated regime came over from the mainland and put the whole island under martial rule, and now the Taiwanese were trapped between the regime that had once put them under martial rule, an authoritarian regime that wanted to absorb them into the mainland, and an imperialist regime pulling strings from across the Pacific.
Not once in modern history had Taiwan been allowed to determine its own future.
Taiwan had only ever been passed from occupier to occupier—indeed, to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, the Han Chinese themselves were occupiers.
So who was I to say any occupier was better than the last?
BEITOU, ALAS, WAS SIMPLY NOT THAT BIG. WE ATE DINNER AT A RAMEN shack and then walked around a bit more, but it was clear that we had seen all there was to see.
I consulted the internet, which informed me there was a restaurant on top of a tower on top of a waste incinerator.
I suggested this to JC, but he said he wasn’t hungry anymore, and it seemed a long way to walk just to see an incinerator.
After we’d looped twice around the same fried dough stand, JC suggested we head back to the hotel.
When we got up to our room, he announced, “I think we should take that bath now.”