Chapter 3 #8
It was Andrew, one of the older students in the program.
Tóngxué, 同學, meant “classmate.” Addressing your peers as such was a distinctly midcentury thing to do.
It evoked the martial discipline of a traditional Chinese classroom.
No one said tóngxué except for a few white students who were inordinately obsessed with Chinese culture, and Andrew was one.
I didn’t know Andrew well. We had only spoken several times in the lounge.
I had gathered that he was a graduate student, he had been in Taipei for over a year, and he was writing a dissertation about folk operas in some rural village I’d never heard of.
But he was being nice to me, and so in that moment, he was my best friend in the world.
“I’m here to spread the word,” said Andrew. His accent impressed me. If I closed my eyes, I might not have clocked that he was white. “Happy hour tonight. You should come through.”
“Tonight?”
It was only Tuesday. After a year of college, I’d still held on to my Puritan conviction that weeknight drinking was for deviants.
“It’s half off for students on Tuesdays,” said Andrew. “Everyone’s going.”
I blinked at my textbook. Those pages were so safe. But I’d already fallen out of the sentence; it would take forever to work my way back in. “I’m worried I’ll fall behind.”
“今朝有酒今朝醉,” said Andrew. This chengyu had become one of the most common sayings around the department. If there is wine today, then get drunk today. Colloquially: YOLO. “I’ll email you the details. Think about it!”
I AGONIZED FOR A WHILE AT THE APARTMENT AND THEN DECIDED to go to happy hour after all. It seemed foolish to turn down any kindness at this moment. I had to make some new friends. I wouldn’t survive this next month otherwise.
It turned out that just about everyone in the program had been invited to this bar.
Anna was standing in a corner with Skipper, Belinda, Margrit, and JC.
Some of them glanced briefly at me when I walked in, and I knew they had just been speaking about me, because they were trying very hard to pretend like they hadn’t.
My first instinct was to turn around and leave.
But this would make things worse—it would confirm I had something to be embarrassed about.
Instead, I walked straight toward the bar.
I kept passing people who looked familiar, who returned my gaze in a vague and friendly way, but I didn’t know their names.
I realized my social circle within the program was actually so small.
This made sense: I saw only the people who had the same classes at the exact same times as I did.
But there were nearly two hundred students in the program, and not all of them could be friends with Anna or JC.
This encouraged me. If I didn’t like the network I was in, then I could just find another one.
“Lily-tóngxué!” Someone jostled my shoulder. I turned; it was Andrew. “You made it!”
“I don’t know what I want to drink.” I was trying to decide between a lychee martini and a passion fruit spritz, both of which sounded like they’d be tastier without the alcohol.
“Can I advise?”
“Um, sure.”
He pulled the drinks menu from my hands. “Don’t bother with the cocktails. Do you like whisky?”
I tried to remember if I did. Fireball was the only whisky I knew about, and the last time I’d had Fireball, I’d been at a Thanksgiving dorm party drinking what people were calling “apple pie” shots.
“I like it fine?”
I could see Anna and JC out of the corner of my eye.
It seemed like they were arguing about something.
JC was talking, his head lowered toward Anna’s ear.
Both of them stared forward, like they didn’t want anyone to know they were arguing.
Anna’s eyes darted in my direction, and I blinked away.
I wanted her to see that I had my own friends, that I was having fun, so I angled my body toward Andrew like he was the most interesting person I had ever met.
He was talking about Taiwan’s local whisky industry.
“It’s very impressive what they’ve managed to do in a few short years,” he said.
“They don’t have the institutional knowledge of the Scottish Highlands, right, but they’ve already become a huge market for single-malt whisky, and the whisky matures much faster here because of the tropical climate, without losing any complexity—”
The bartender asked, in English, if we knew what we wanted.
“Kavalan Classic.” Andrew said the “Kavalan” part in Chinese, but the “Classic” in English.
“On the rocks?”
“Neat for me.”
The bartender turned to me. “Same for you?”
I hesitated. What rocks did he mean?
“You have to drink it neat,” said Andrew. “You can add some drops of water if you want, to open up the flavor, but the only way to understand whisky is to first try it neat.”
“Okay, neat, I guess.”
The bartender slid our glasses over.
“Cheers,” said Andrew. “Ganbei!”
I drank as instructed. There were many instructions—Andrew would not stop talking.
I was to sniff first, observe the color, observe the legs.
What were legs? Andrew said something about spacing and ethanol molecules.
I thought I saw them, but I couldn’t be sure.
I could have been observing something else entirely.
I was to take one small sip, hold it on my tongue, swallow, suck in a bit of air, and feel the oxygen interact with the aftertaste.
Then I was to have another sip, this time focusing on the subtler notes.
“Can you taste the fruit?” Andrew asked. “The taste is really distinctive to this region. Can you taste the mango?”
It seemed important to Andrew that I taste the mango, so I nodded.
I was trying to determine how old Andrew was.
He seemed familiar with all of the undergraduates, but I didn’t think he could be younger than twenty-five.
He didn’t have enough hair. He wore leather sandals that were falling apart, and a faint odor accompanied him wherever he trod.
It wasn’t a disgusting odor; he didn’t seem unshowered or anything.
You just got the sense he had been walking around all day and things had accumulated.
He was trying to sleep with me. I might not have realized this before, but I had practice now after my day with JC.
You had a good hunch if guys wanted to sleep with you if they angled their body toward yours in a certain way, like they were trying to block you off from the rest of the room.
And you could tell for sure if they were being very nice to you for no reason.
I didn’t feel excited or creeped out by this.
I just felt tired. How had this happened to me twice in a week?
I was not especially sexy, nor did I feel I was giving out strong signals of desire.
I was just available. Maybe if Andrew had seen Anna sitting alone in the library, he would be teaching her about Kavalan’s distilling techniques instead.
“So how’s your time here been?” Andrew asked. He had already drained his Kavalan Classic; now he was drinking the Kavalan Concertmaster. “Did you feel a kind of cultural awakening here in Taipei?”
“Kind of, yeah,” I said. “It’s weird. I’ve never been to a foreign country and felt—I don’t know, this instant connection.”
This was the wrong thing to say. Andrew’s face lit up, like he had been waiting to spring a trap.
“The myth of consanguination,” he crowed.
“You’re from the mainland, aren’t you? Yeah—Guangzhou?
I knew it. I thought so. You think because you are essentially Chinese, and they are essentially Chinese, that you have anything in common.
But you don’t! It’s like there was a civil war in the American heartland, and some people fled to Nova Scotia, and everyone else fled to England.
And then after growing up in England, your kid visited Nova Scotia and felt this ‘instant connection.’ Wouldn’t you think that was weird? ”
There were several missing steps in this argument, but I could see Andrew’s point.
It was strange, perhaps unethical, for me to lay any cultural claim on this island.
Still, it stirred something inside me—was that so wrong?
“But probably Taiwan has more of the culture that my parents knew.” I found myself echoing what the tour guide had said at the National Palace Museum.
“It’s like, not all that unreasonable that I feel some attachment. ”
“But which China did your parents grow up in?” Andrew asked.
“The one with all that culture, or the one under the Communists? They were probably born right after the Cultural Revolution, right? After they smashed the Four Olds? So then what would they know about authentic Chinese culture?” He took another sip of his whisky.
“You know, when you think about it, it’s actually ludicrous that all you heritage speakers are hanging out in the same room. ”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean your parents and grandparents were all on different sides of this decades-long conflict, and it’s entirely possible that at some point they were pointing guns at each other.
Think about it.” He gestured around the room with his glass.
“You’ve got a kid from Hong Kong, a kid from Singapore, a kid from Beijing, and a kid from Taiwan.
So you had Communists and Nationalists and peasants and landlords.
Your grandparents would have killed each other, you know?
But here you are, acting like the mere fact of your Chineseness is some centrifugal force. Isn’t that bizarre?”
I said it was probably easier to be collectively Chinese because none of our parents had done the actual killing. I didn’t know what evidence I had for this claim, but I was fairly sure that neither my parents nor grandparents had ever pointed a gun at anyone.