Chapter 5
Courtesy of the author
When I was a child I learned a mental trick by which I could reduce bad things to abstractions.
It didn’t matter if my sister was threatening to hang herself, or if my father was threatening to hang himself, or if everyone was screaming and smashing things downstairs.
I determined that none of it could affect me.
It had nothing to do with me, and I couldn’t do anything about it anyway, and so it wasn’t real.
So as long as I locked my door and put on my headphones, I could make the rest of the house melt away and pretend nothing else existed, that the muffled thumps from below were hallucinations, and that the entire world was limited to the things inside my bedroom: my bed, my desk, and my books.
I would stay there until the danger had passed.
In college I was assigned to read passages from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and I learned that this mindset was called Stoicism.
You couldn’t control external events, but you could control your reactions to them.
Things hurt you only as much as you let them.
It was important to maintain perspective.
Loss was bad because your world was missing something, correct?
Okay—so I took a tally of what I’d lost. Gonggong was gone.
My mother was in mourning. That was unfortunate.
But nothing substantive was missing from my life.
I had not seen my gonggong much for the past few years.
I had not planned to see him much in the future.
During the vast majority of my days, he did not cross my mind, and wasn’t it irrational to mourn a relationship I didn’t have?
What I had lost, really, was the occasional video call that I dreaded to begin with.
So while his death was real, objectively speaking, there was a subjective sense in which his death did not figure in my life in any significant way.
And so if I focused hard enough, perhaps I would not have to go through the grieving process.
Perhaps I could pretend that this hadn’t happened and go back to focusing on my classes.
But when I woke up the next morning I still felt that terrible weight across my body, and it still hurt to breathe.
I thought about skipping class and staying home for the third day in a row.
I weighed the two options in my head: the discomfort of sitting for hours in the department, or the discomfort of sitting at home alone.
But then I received an email saying I was wanted urgently in the program office.
That did it. Above all else, I hated disappointing the authorities.
“Hi, Lily.” Teacher Xu—the program director—was waiting for me in the office. I knew then that I was in serious trouble. “How are you doing?”
She gestured at the chair across from her, so I sat down. “I’m okay.”
“And how do you feel about the program so far?”
“Pretty good, I guess.” It was hard to look her in the eyes. “I like all my classes.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Teacher Xu leaned forward.
“Your teachers say that you’re making good progress, and that you are typically well prepared and active in class.
However, I’d like to remind you about our program’s attendance policy.
So far you have missed three days, without once communicating with the office.
This is unacceptable, Lily. First, it is disrespectful to your teachers.
Second, if you miss any more classes, then you risk failing the program. ”
“I understand.”
So they had had faculty meetings about me. They had discussed whether I was a good student or not, and if not, then what should be done with me. This had never happened to me before. My best quality was being unobtrusive. I had never posed a problem to anyone, for any reason.
“I know it is very exciting to be in a new city for the first time,” said Teacher Xu.
“You’re away from home, you have a lot of freedom, and there are many fun opportunities.
You may, for instance, wish to go on day trips with your classmates.
But I urge you to contain those trips to the weekends.
You are here on a government grant, correct?
Those grants are to support your studies. They are not meant for . . . resorts.”
So the rumors about Beitou had reached Teacher Xu too.
I was horrified. I needed her to understand that I was not this person she imagined.
I was a good, diligent Chinese girl; I did all my homework, I showed up to class, I did not break the rules, and I did not go to hot springs resorts to do vile things with the other gender.
But I had missed all those classes. I had gone to Beitou with JC and I had been naked in that tub and I had drunk all that whisky at the bar with Andrew. I had become this person in Taipei: a bad girl who did not prioritize her studies.
“I’m very sorry I missed class yesterday,” I said. “My grandfather passed away.”
“Ah.” Teacher Xu’s expression softened. “I see. That’s—I’m sorry to hear it. So you went to his funeral?”
“No, the funeral is in Guangzhou. It’s today, actually.
My family is in Guangzhou. But my mom, she .
. .” I didn’t know how to say “layover.” I struggled for a moment, and that made every next word a battle to pronounce, and then all I managed to get out was some gibberish to the effect of “She came here first, and then I went and saw her, and then she went to Guangzhou.”
“I understand.” I couldn’t tell if Teacher Xu believed or understood me, but she didn’t react the way I had hoped. “That is very sad to hear, of course. But that is still an unexcused absence.”
I WAS DISCOVERING THAT ONE COULD NOT GET A LOT OF EMOTIONAL capital trading upon a grandparent’s death.
My other teachers reacted the same way when I told them why I’d missed class: They said they were sorry, and then they reminded me of my overdue homework.
I was disappointed, and guilty about feeling disappointed.
I had really thought everyone would be nicer to me, all things considered.
I got the sense that grandparents did not count.
Siblings counted. Parents counted. They were present in your life in ways that mattered.
You could get tons of sympathy by telling people your mother or father had died.
But it was no surprise when a grandparent died.
Grandparents were defined by their declining health, by their dementia and hip-replacement surgeries and chemotherapy.
Your whole childhood was preparation for your grandparents dying.
Parents died, and people understood if this wrecked you for a year, for many years.
Grandparents died, and it was very sad, but that was just part of growing up. You were supposed to walk it off.
IN MODERN TAIWANESE LITERATURE, WE WERE ON A GOOD RUN with stories about death.
We had just finished reading an experimentalist science fiction short story by an author named Chuan Beimu.
I had to read it a few times to understand what was happening.
The main character’s father has recently passed away, but the main character keeps seeing him pop up on street view in Google Maps.
Eventually he is able to confront his father’s ghost, who reveals that Google hires ghosts of the recently deceased to photograph distant locations for its navigation apps.
In death, his father gets to go exploring like he never did in life.
All this makes the main character feel better about his father’s passing.
He’s not really gone, after all; he’s just exploring the North Pole.
Shuya wanted to know if Google had sponsored the story, and Teacher Lin said that she didn’t know.
Teacher Lin asked us if any of us had lost family members or had stories we wanted to share about grief. We sat silent for a moment.
“Of course, Lily’s grandfather recently passed away,” said Teacher Lin.
I said I didn’t have anything interesting to say about it, and Teacher Lin didn’t press.
Meijuan offered, “My father died a few years ago.”
A parent was a big deal. We all made some noises of sympathy.
Meijuan went on. This had happened back in Myanmar, during the height of the pandemic.
Meijuan’s whole family had come down with Covid at the same time.
She and her siblings had fairly mild cases, but their parents’ fevers weren’t breaking, and their oxygen levels were low.
She and her sister had planned to take their parents to the hospital.
It was hard back then to secure hospital admission, but they had made some calls, and a friend knew a friend, and so on.
They had a car booked and everything. That morning, while she and her sister were eating breakfast, their father called out and asked for a sponge bath.
“At first we ignored him,” she said. “I mean, we were tired too, and we were in the middle of breakfast. So we finished eating first, and then we went to go wipe him down. He was covered in sweat. He was really struggling. But he’d been like that for a while, so I thought we still had time.
But then when I was patting his neck I noticed he wasn’t breathing.
And I realized he’d just died. In my arms. Just like that.
” She made a gesture with her hands to show us how she had held him: like she was a groom and her father’s corpse was her bride.
None of us said anything, so Meijuan went on.
The real nightmare was scheduling his funeral during lockdown.
No one could travel. Her younger brother, the only one who didn’t have Covid, had to go out and oversee the cremation.
All the funeral homes would turn you away if the cause of death was Covid, so he’d lied and said their father had died of a stroke.
“Why did he have to oversee the cremation?” Shuya asked.