Chapter 6
Courtesy of the author
On Monday, I made a bargain with myself.
I split myself into three temporal identities.
This was the best way to understand my current state of mind.
One version of me existed before receiving my mother’s text, and she was perhaps not having the most wonderful time in Taipei but was getting by.
Then, right now, there was a stricken mind and a body that had to be dealt with, cleaned and fed and put in the right places at the right times.
And then, several months or maybe a year from now, there hopefully existed a version of me who wasn’t crying all the time.
She would be very glad to have had all these cultural experiences, and disappointed if she’d squandered her summer abroad.
So if it made no difference to me now, I might as well create some good memories for that future self.
This temporal bargain also worked in the short term.
If I put myself in a public place, then the chances improved that I would do the things to comport with that place.
You couldn’t just lie down and cry in a café, for example.
You had to minimally keep it together. And you couldn’t have a breakdown at the National Concert Hall, or spend class in a depressed fugue, and so on.
So if I mustered the willpower to get out there now, then I might be rewarded in the future.
In the Zhuangzi there was a story about a monkey keeper who promised his monkeys that they could have four peaches for dinner if they could get by on just three peaches for breakfast. Then of course at dinnertime, he gave them only three peaches but promised four peaches for breakfast the next morning, and so on and so on.
The monkeys never wised up. The chengyu based on this fable was 朝三暮四: three in the morning, four in the afternoon.
It was used to describe someone facetious and unreliable, someone who was always changing the story.
But I was deceiving myself here, and I didn’t think it was so nefarious.
The monkey keeper wasn’t trying to starve his monkeys, he was just trying to give them some hope.
You could delude yourself into believing lots of things if you trusted that eventually life would get better.
OF COURSE, WHEN THE TIME CAME I NEVER WANTED TO GO.
Every morning, I ran through the same mental dialectic while the clock ticked closer to nine.
Getting up, simply constituting myself as a subject involved such strain, and what if we shattered into a million pieces on the bus, what if we dissolved into a puddle at the department, what if today was the day that Teacher Cai pointed at me and asked a question and my skull cracked trying to answer?
But if I did not go, there would be no structure to the day.
Then I would have nothing to do, and no choice but to lie facedown in bed, sapped of the willpower to move.
Anything worth doing would lose its prospects as the day went by, until finally it was nine in the evening and still I would not have moved, and then I would not be able to sleep because I had already slept all day.
And then I would be alone, in the dark, thinking of the killing fields.
I SOUGHT OUT PLACES WHERE I COULD BE A PART OF A CROWD.
I wanted to be around Taiwanese people, but I was embarrassed that in all this time I had not formed a relationship with a single Taiwanese person except my teachers, who were paid to spend time with me.
Somehow I’d been even worse at this than Skipper.
I could blame this on the structure of the program: My department was full of foreigners, and outside of class time there were not many organic opportunities to make friends.
Anyhow, it seemed unethical to force a friendship on the locals, to demand that they contribute to my experience abroad.
Meanwhile there were so many shared, public tableaus I could join.
I gravitated toward concerts, films, cafés, and crowds.
I had stopped reading reviews on Google Maps.
Every day I would get on a different bus and keep riding until I noticed a lot of people were getting off, and then I would follow this critical mass to wherever they were going next.
I wandered around industrial parks and shopping plazas.
I walked through residential districts. I loved cafés most of all.
You didn’t have to pay much to go into a café, and you could stay there for as long as you liked, listening to the conversations floating in the air.
I tried not to form a routine circuit. I sought out a new café every afternoon, just to be around people who were working and talking.
I went to a bubble tea café on the top floor of a bookstore near campus where every drink came with cheese foam by default.
Where had this Asian obsession with cheese come from?
You had to specifically request its removal if you didn’t want cheese foam.
I went to Tò-uat Books, where the letters on the window read: “RESIST CHINA / FREEDOM NOW / #FREETIBET / #STANDWITHHK / #SAVEUYGHUR / #STANDWITHUKRAINE,” and a blue banner indoors read, “Hong Kong is NOT China,” and the low door in front of the coffee kiosk was draped with a Pride flag.
Such purpose! I wanted to linger inside, but there was some kind of book club going on, and everyone looked so serious that I was scared off.
I went several times to Editor Books the beef chunks were still frozen on the inside, but I didn’t mind.
The vibes were too good. A pretty girl with two long, swinging braids took the table across from me, and I watched her pull out an Advanced English Through Literature textbook.
I was making flash cards from my Modern Taiwanese Literature textbook. She caught my eye, and we both smiled.
A group of six adults came in once while I was studying.
I watched them for a while, trying to determine their relationship to one another.
It wasn’t obvious. They all seemed to know at least one other person present, but not everyone knew everyone in the group.
They kept making introductions. Here was an old friend from college.
Here was a colleague at the department. They kept hugging.
I liked their way of speaking. They seemed so patient, so gentle with one another.
They ordered lunch—three butter chicken curries and two beef tomato stews—and when everyone’s tray had arrived, they linked hands, bowed their heads, and prayed.
IN THE EVENINGS, I KEPT GOING BACK TO THE NATIONAL CONCERT Hall. I could always get discounted student tickets, and there was always something going on, every night of the week.
The audience was not always as well behaved as they had been for the Israeli pianist. That had been a special occasion, it turned out.
I rarely saw foreigners in the concert hall after that.
Never again did I see a full house. Most of the time, only a quarter of the seats were occupied.
When local musicians played, people showed up in tank tops and shorts.
At a string quartet performance by four Taiwanese sisters, the old woman behind me sat cracking peanut shells between her teeth the entire time.
Once during a performance by the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, a cell phone went off between movements and kept ringing for an unreasonably long interval.
The audience rustled. A few people laughed.
The conductor—an esteemed guest conductor visiting from Germany—turned around and threw up his arms, and his eyes flashed a look that said, These people.
IT WAS STRANGE THAT I SHOULD ADORE CLASSICAL MUSIC NOW, when as a child I had thrown so many tantrums over being forced to practice the violin that finally my mother let me quit.
One night I strolled into the concert hall on a whim without reading the program description.
There was a full orchestra onstage, but all the performers were unexpectedly young—at least two of them could have been in middle school.
The conductor explained to us that this was the summer recital of Taiwan’s youth orchestra.
He’d founded this youth orchestra in his home city of Taoyuan to create more career and development opportunities for young artists.
The musicians we were hearing tonight, all under eighteen, had made it through several rounds of regional, then national auditions.
They were the best of the best. I felt a small burn of resentment, though I had not touched an instrument in years.
This reaction was ingrained, instinctive.
Any well-behaved Chinese child was a threat.