Chapter 6 #2
I couldn’t take my eyes off the first violin—a tall, long-limbed boy in a black suit that was much too short in the arms. His hair was slicked back so neatly, except for a single strand that kept falling over his eyes.
He played with his whole body. His eyes fluttered closed whenever the music swelled, and he swooned this way and that, dancing in his seat.
Back home he would have been named something like Kevin or Jonathan.
He probably would have played during worship at church, and all the parents would have fawned over him, and I would have had a confused crush on him, and all the college admissions officers would have rolled their eyes as they wrote off another Asian applicant whose extracurricular was orchestra.
Back home he would have been a stereotype; here, he was just a kid who loved his violin.
I wondered if I would have stuck with the violin if I’d grown up in Taipei, and I imagined myself for a moment as one of the girls onstage beside him.
Shiny black hair braided down my back. Shiny black dress; shiny black shoes, toes tapping to the beat.
EVERY TIME I LEFT THE CONCERT HALL, I PONDERED WHY I HAD come all this way just to listen to music from Western Europe.
I felt a little guilty spending my fellowship funds on concert tickets, since technically we were only supposed to spend money on “Taiwanese cultural enrichment activities,” and listening to classical music by European composers was in no way a Taiwanese cultural enrichment activity, unless you considered the fact that many of the musicians and audience were Taiwanese, so didn’t whatever they participated in count as a Taiwanese activity?
Anyhow, I’d given up on the project of authentic connection.
Taiwan had as little to do with me as Franz Liszt did.
My family was not from here. I was in fact the first person in my family to visit Taipei; my mother was the second.
Gonggong had never set foot on this island.
He very well could have; that branch path did exist. If he had stuck with the Nationalists, if he had fled here in 1949 with all the other soldiers and their families, then I might have grown up visiting relatives in a high-rise in Taoyuan who took me to hotel restaurants where sesame buns looked like pears.
But this was not how things had gone, and any nostalgia this place induced in me was for a past in the subjunctive: maybe, should have, if only.
This rupture was very freeing. It absolved anything I saw from the burden of significance.
I was not homecoming and I was not a tourist. I was just a student, and I was living in a city among two and a half million other people, many of whom loved Liszt, just like me, and we were all calling this place home, for now.
I WAS GETTING PRACTICED AT PICKING THE AMERICAN SUMMER transplants out of a crowd.
They were the grumpiest and sweatiest, and the older they were, the more unhappy they looked.
The boys whined as they trailed behind their parents, complaining that their data service was not fast enough, and the girls sat sullen, arms folded tight across their stomachs, picking at their food.
I sympathized. My mother had taken me on a trip to Shanghai the summer after I started high school, a stinking hot trip that was comprised largely of waiting in lines while standing in the shade, cooling myself with a souvenir battery-powered fan.
I had spent most of it shutting out the world with my Skullcandy headphones, staring out bus windows, counting down the hours until our flight home.
Twelve through sixteen were the worst ages to come back to China; the worst ages, period.
Your boobs were coming in, but so was the rest of your body fat.
Nothing fit right. Your skin was greasy, painful, and red; you tried every product at the drugstore, but none of them worked.
You had to buy new clothes every few months, but no matter how often you sized up your jeans, you kept squeezing out the sides.
It was too hot, too humid, and you were too grumpy to face your relatives’ goodwill.
Everyone marveled over how big you’d gotten, but you could read the shock in their faces: You had been ravaged by hormones; you were not cute anymore.
Several years ago one of our aunts in Guangzhou had taken Jasmine for some kind of treatment promised to resolve her cystic acne; there was an allergic reaction, something to do with a needle, and many screaming recriminations, and Jasmine never went back to China again.
You were struggling enough to become a subject in the culture that you knew.
Now was the worst time to throw into the mix all the possible versions of you that you now could not be.
All you could see were the ways in which the Chinese kids were better than you: poreless, sweatless, excellent at math, skilled at weaving their bikes in and out of traffic.
How cruel it was to throw a steak-fed, butter-creamy American child into Asia and ask: Could you survive here? Could you fit in?
God—and then they wanted you to speak! It was fine for small children to utter only one or two phrases in Chinese.
Children were applauded if they could say anything coherent at all.
But a fourteen-year-old was approaching adulthood, was educated now, and when a fourteen-year-old had to ask her mother to translate a phrase like “Is there ginger in this?” it put her in a different tier of shame.
I saw these teenagers; I knew all they felt was stupid, slow, and inadequate, just as I had felt on those trips.
This was an alien environment, and though their parents could switch back without effort, that bridge had been shattered for them long ago.
It was not happening for them anymore. And each trip would be more uncomfortable, more alienating and diminishing, until they stopped coming at all.
It doesn’t matter, I wanted to tell them. Stop counting down the minutes. Ask for the words you don’t know. Use your phone. Use your bad grammar. Be stupid, slow, and inadequate. Just be here.
I ONLY EVER RETURNED TO THE APARTMENT TO SLEEP THESE DAYS, which meant often I did not come back until around midnight.
I could therefore avoid any interaction with Anna.
Sometimes she was already fast asleep when I got back, or at least nestled so deeply in bed that she could pretend not to notice me.
Sometimes she didn’t come back all night.
I considered asking her about her schedule, just so I could spend an evening in for once.
But I didn’t want her to know I cared. I enjoyed this game of chicken—bluffing that we both had somewhere better to be.
I liked staying out. I took pride in my capability to roam, untethered, unbothered.
I RECEIVED AN EMAIL REMINDER FROM KLOOK: MY PINGLIN COUNTY Tea Tour was in twenty-four hours, the bus pickup point was outside one of the entrances to the Taipei 101 station, and I would recognize my guide by his blue-and-white checkered flag.
I had entirely forgotten about this tour.
Anna and I had booked it during our first week in Taipei, when we were still determined to go on day trips every weekend.
I decided to go: The activity was well reviewed, and I had already paid.
If Anna wanted to join me, then she was welcome.
Anna did not come. I was the only solo traveler.
The activity description had promised a private tour, but I understood now that this meant it was a private tour for all the strangers who showed up to comprise the group.
There was a white family from Philadelphia, which I knew because the parents kept informing the people in the rows in front of and behind them that they were from Philadelphia.
There was an Asian American family decked out entirely in Harvard gear: T-shirts, caps, backpacks, and everything.
The mother and father were sleekly attractive, and their twin sons, who looked about my age, were inappropriately tall.
There were three Singaporean women with the palest skin I’d ever seen, covered head-to-toe with hats, sunglasses, and long-sleeved shirts.
Last on the bus was a couple about my age, perhaps a bit older, whom I couldn’t have placed racially or nationally if I’d tried.
They were late; they came sprinting onto the bus five minutes past the designated departure time.
I thought perhaps the girl was at least part Chinese because she apologized to the driver in fluent, melodic Mandarin.
But when they got on the bus behind me, they kept toggling between French and English.
The boy was handsome, but the girl was unbearably beautiful, with pale skin and freckles and thick, loosely curled brown hair.
I couldn’t keep looking at them; I was so jealous.
Our tour guide was a squat, smiling man with glasses. He introduced himself as Jackie: “like Jackie Chan, so you won’t forget.” He explained he had styled himself as Jackie several years ago because tourists kept butchering his real name, and there was a pause before everyone chuckled.
Jackie spoke into a microphone at the front of the bus.
There were mini speakers installed at intervals along the ceiling, so that no matter where we sat, it sounded like he was speaking right in our ears.
We were making three stops today: first, a tea plantation; second, a village teashop to experience a traditional tea pouring ceremony; and third, the Pinglin Tea Museum.
It was about a ninety-minute drive to our first location, and we had a lot to do, so he hoped that we had all used the restroom.