Chapter 4 #6
“I feel like my Chinese is getting way better.” I realized we had been speaking English all morning, but it was too late in the day now to switch.
“We’re learning how to make classical allusions too.
Like Confucius.” I wanted to show off. In Thought and Society, we had slowly accumulated a number of sayings from the Analects that were still quoted regularly in everyday life.
The words just slipped out, before I had time to consider what they meant.
父母在, 不遠遊. “When your parents are still alive, do not wander far.”
My mother set down the tin of pineapple cakes and stared at me. Her eyes were red. Her hand trembled, and for the briefest moment, I thought she might slap me. “Why would you say that?”
“It’s just something we learned. Sorry, Mom—it’s just a quote.”
She shook her head, and it seemed she was talking to the air more than to me. “But why do they teach that?”
WE TOOK THE ESCALATOR UP TO YET ANOTHER FOOD HALL. MY mother kept asking me if I was hungry. This was an olive branch: I had been forgiven. She read things off menus like they were rare, astonishing delicacies. Did I want salted duck congee? Hainan chicken rice?
I did consider it every time she asked, because eating would be a nice way to pass the time.
A meal gave you structure. You considered the menu, you ordered your food, the food came, you picked your way through it, and then you paid the bill.
All together this could take up to an hour, if we really dragged our feet.
Each time she asked, I imagined putting food in my mouth, and my stomach roiled.
No, I told her; I wasn’t in the mood, not yet.
We kept wandering. The arrivals lounge had seemed so enormous when I first arrived; all the storefronts bursting with possibility, goodies from another world.
But now I had been inside the city, and it was clear these stores were just holding areas, facsimiles of real life to occupy your attention until you could move on.
I had stopped checking the time. This was my world now.
I had lived in Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport forever.
The seconds slowed to a trickle, and I had resigned myself to this liminal space, this hollowed-out feeling of having nothing to look forward to, but nothing to move on from.
This felt purifying. Penance for not feeling the right kind of grief.
I had to step out of time, outside routine and expectation, and see what that felt like.
There was no shape to the day, only the silence, and its weight.
We walked with no direction. We turned down hallways just to see where they led.
We rode the elevator to the other side of the gift concourse.
“You can’t get to security from here,” a guard told us.
He asked what we were up to, and my mother said we were just walking around.
He asked to see her boarding pass. Then he told us we had to go back to the main lounge, even though the gift concourse was clearly open to the public.
I wanted to argue, but my mother said it was okay.
She hadn’t found anything she wanted to buy.
WE DECIDED TO GO UP TO THE FIFTH-FLOOR VIEWING PLATFORM.
We had seen several signs indicating its existence, though it was harder than expected to find.
We couldn’t get there from the third or fourth floors.
We had to go around the back of the first floor and take a series of escalators, then walk through a series of doors that seemed like they were off-limits but weren’t.
At last we emerged onto a large balcony facing the landing strips.
Five people were already up there. They were all men.
They didn’t seem to know one another. They were sitting on different benches, and they wore different kinds of clothes.
One man wore a full suit and sunglasses.
One was dressed in what looked like a maintenance uniform and was curled up asleep on his bench.
None of them so much as glanced our way. They just kept gazing at the airfield.
I wondered who they were. This seemed like a weird place to wait for a flight, so far from the food halls and security gates.
Maybe they were commuters. Maybe they went to Tokyo every week and came home on the weekends; maybe they knew the schedule by heart and knew down to the minute when they had to go downstairs.
Maybe they weren’t flying at all. This seemed more likely—none of them had luggage.
One of them, the young man smoking by the balcony, wasn’t even wearing a shirt.
Maybe they all worked at the airport in different capacities.
Maybe they were on break. Maybe they just liked planes.
One of the men held a black camera with a lens nearly a foot long, and every time a plane rushed down the runway he raised it and clicked the shutter a dozen times until the plane was cleanly in the air.
I looked over at my mother. She had put on her sunglasses.
She sat with her arms folded in her lap, her feet crossed at the ankles.
She was perfectly still, her mouth relaxed.
For once, I felt no pressure to fill the silence.
No questions, no platitudes: just the occasional click of the camera and the rising and falling roars from the airfield.
We sat there for a long time, watching the planes take off.