Chapter 3 #6
I had once read in an advice column that truly charismatic people knew how to be alone, and the truly productive knew how to be bored.
So if I wanted to be charismatic and productive, then I should figure out how to spend Sunday by myself.
The possibilities were endless. I could watch anything, cue up any of the three-hour Taiwan New Cinema films that Teacher Lin kept insisting we watch.
I could go treat myself to a nice meal, like the omakase at the sushi stand down the street.
I could even masturbate, which I had not done since the end of last term, because I hadn’t once had a bedroom to myself.
I tried this, but JC’s face floated before my eyes, and then I wasn’t in the mood.
So many hours ahead, but I couldn’t commit to anything.
Nothing felt urgent enough to start. I made some attempt at studying, but no matter how hard I threw my mind at the page, the connections between symbol and meaning failed to form.
Characters slid in and out of focus. I labored through sentences and forgot how they’d started before I reached the end.
Late in the afternoon, I realized that I hadn’t spoken a single word out loud all day.
“Huh,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me, tinny and foreign. “Alone,” I said, in English. Then again. “Alone, alone, alone.” The syllables rolled off my tongue, the sound of an eternal afternoon sun.
I MISSED ANNA AGAIN ON MONDAY. I SLEPT LATE, AND SHE GOT UP early, and by the time I was up for my shower she had already left for class.
So the situation was worse than I had thought.
I was familiar with this sort of silence, the heaviness of the air before thunder.
I had felt this thickness often throughout my childhood.
I could never pinpoint the interaction that alerted me—maybe the tone in which Jasmine uttered something at the dinner table, maybe the way my father’s face tightened in response—but I always knew, and Flora always knew, and we just tiptoed around, giggling nervously, until one of them started to scream, and then someone was smashing all the dishes in the kitchen, one by one by one.
CLASS DRAGGED THAT DAY. IT WASN’T JUST ME. EVERYONE SEEMED clobbered by the weekend. It was inordinately hot, the peak of a heat wave, and we slumped listless by the open windows, batting away the flies.
In Thought and Society, we spent nearly the whole hour hung up on a single phrase: 乖悖.
The character 乖, pronounced guāi, meant “good, obedient.” I knew this because Flora’s childhood nickname was Guai-Guai, and we never stopped making fun of her for it.
Jasmine and I were named An-An and Li-Li, literally “comfort-comfort” and “pretty-pretty,” while poor Flora was named “obedient-obedient.” But paired with the character 悖, 乖 suddenly meant “contrary,” or “perverse.” It never meant those things in any other context. Why now?
“It happens sometimes.” Teacher Cai wrote another character on the board.
去, qù, “to go.” “This used to mean something different in Classical Chinese. If you 去 a place, that means you’re leaving a place.
Now when you 去 somewhere, it means you’re going to somewhere.
” She stepped back, frowning at the board.
“Hm. Chinese is more confusing than people realize.”
“But how can the meaning flip like that?” I asked. I couldn’t think of any English words that did this. It seemed a basic requirement of any functional language that it could distinguish opposite meanings from one another.
“Well,” said Teacher Sun, “in a sense, all meanings contain their own opposite. We gather when this happens from context.”
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. It seemed Chinese would always be impenetrable to me. I could commit thousands of characters to memory, but still their meanings could flip on me at any time.
JC WASN’T WAITING FOR ME IN THE LOBBY AT LUNCHTIME.
I HAD expected this, but still it stung.
I hung around for a few moments, just in case, and then I crossed the street to the Starbucks.
I didn’t want a real lunch, I just wanted to sit somewhere with air-conditioning.
I ordered something called a “chocolate marshmallow scone,” but it didn’t resemble anything like a scone. It tasted like dirt.
IN MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE, WE WERE READING A STORY called “The Tribe of Generals” by Chen Yingzhen.
The story was about an old man and a young girl who both belong to a roving music band.
The old man is possibly attracted to and definitely spying on the young girl while she sleeps.
The young girl was sold off into sexual servitude by her family and ran away but is going back to her family, because otherwise they will have to sell off her younger sister to cover their debt.
The old man gifts her his retirement savings so that she can pay off the debt, but this means he has to keep playing with the roving music band.
Years later, they reunite. The young girl still became a prostitute, but at this point has managed to buy her way out.
The old man is older, and just as lonely as before.
They don’t have sex. They kill themselves by the roadside.
Teacher Lin told us that the story was a metaphor for the relationship between China and Taiwan.
The old man was China: too sick, poor, and ugly to do anything to help the young girl, who represented Taiwan: sold out to and mistreated by various partners.
(We had a running joke that all the stories we read in class were about one of three things: (1) the trauma of the Chinese Civil War; (2) the trauma of martial law under the Nationalists, or (3) the trauma of modernization.) Teacher Lin asked us if we agreed with this interpretation.
I didn’t know how I could possibly comment on this. Shuya and Meijuan didn’t seem to know either, so the silence kept dragging out between us.
By now we had learned that you could take two attitudes into class.
You could lean in and try to follow every word of the conversation like a rapt squirrel, racking your brains for any new vocabulary that applied.
Or you could be passive. You could respond to questions when asked but otherwise give nothing.
Everyone had days when they gave nothing, but the trouble was that we had all decided to give nothing at the same time.
We were five weeks into the program and tired of thinking in Chinese.
Meijuan had visibly lost weight. Shuya still had no air-conditioning at his apartment and therefore was always suffering something close to heatstroke.
Normally when we didn’t have much to contribute, we asked Teacher Lin to explain various aspects of Taiwanese culture to us.
But we had already spent the previous week interrogating her about roving music bands, child prostitution, rural poverty, and the trauma of the Chinese Civil War.
Now there was nothing more to say. We had recently learned the chengyu 拋磚引玉: to throw bricks and retrieve jade, which meant to offer a modest remark in hope of eliciting wisdom from others.
But today Teacher Lin was throwing jade in desperation, and we wouldn’t even give her bricks.
“So,” she said at last. “Do you have any questions about the vocabulary words in this story?”
We all shook our heads.
“Are there any parts of the story you want especially to discuss?”
A disinterested shuffle of pages. I kept my eyes down, pretending I was checking the definition of some phrase in the text. I felt bad for Teacher Lin, but not bad enough to try.
IN MY ONE-ON-ONE CLASS, WE WERE CORRECTING MY ESSAY FOR that week’s presentation.
“Overall, this is not a bad effort.” Teacher Sun pulled up my marked-up essay on the screen. It was a wall of red.
I had tried so hard on this one. I had double-checked every phrase in my dictionary app and had made sure to pattern every grammar configuration after a parallel sentence in the textbook. Where had all these errors come from?
My despair grew as Teacher Sun took me through everything that marked the difference between my writing style and a native speaker’s style.
I would never have clocked these mistakes.
I had no idea these were things you shouldn’t do.
I had placed a causative clause after the explanation.
I kept using a certain introductory phrase where I should have used a different one.
Sometimes what I’d written was grammatically correct, but a native speaker would have employed a slightly different word order.
Why? There was no why. There were no rules.
There was a certain rhythm that came naturally to native speakers, but I didn’t have the ear for it.
All I could do was try to internalize some general guidelines.
I had to compose in parallelisms, I had to use four-character strings instead of three, and I had to insert random characters for emphasis (whose meanings I could never keep straight), except for when it was inappropriate to do so, but I couldn’t know when that was.
I thought about the many English essays I had been forced to edit by the Chinese parents’ mafia network over the past year.
In December of my senior year of high school, word got around in my father’s village that I had been accepted to Yale, Yéluˇ , and then everyone was asking my father if I would look over their child’s work.
Every few weeks my dad would text me something like, Hey, Qiuqiu’s mother wants some help.
Are you available? And if I said I wasn’t available, he would remind me that Qiuqiu’s mother had once brought eight-treasure soup to my mother when she was in labor with my sister, and so we really owed her one.