Chapter 6 #4
Now this was interesting. I stood up. The signs on the wall explained: Tea was made by steeping leaves in water.
A simple concept, but this metaphor in fact held the secret to all life on earth.
The universe was created through steeping.
Organic matter was steeped in a primordial soup, and from this sprang life as we know it.
Prokaryotes became people. Steeping was a genesis, a metamorphosis: Through steeping, the small became large, the concentrated became diffuse, the hard became soft, the dirty became clean, and the sick became cured.
What a simple yet profound observation! I could think of many things that became better versions of themselves after being steeped in hot water: instant noodles, shiitake mushrooms, Magic Grow sea animals.
Farther back in the museum there was a table where you could sniff jars filled with tea leaves of different varieties, but this seemed like an afterthought.
Whoever had curated this exhibit was clearly more excited by the cosmological significance of steeping.
There were jars of probably-fake organs floating suspended in liquid.
There was a plastic Japanese schoolgirl sitting atop a ramen cup.
There was a life-size plastic exhibit of three capybaras floating happily in a bath.
Two were sipping tea from cups, and all three had oranges on their heads.
There was a life-size replica of E.T. I searched my memories of that film, but I still couldn’t figure out what E.T.
had to do with the pleasure of steeping.
I asked the museum docent, who told me that she wasn’t sure, that perhaps E.T. was there just for fun.
AT FIVE O’CLOCK, JACKIE, TRUE TO HIS WORD, WAS WAITING BY the door. The Singaporeans, the Philadelphians, and the attractive maybe-French couple were ready in the foyer, but most of the Harvard family was missing. Only the mother was present.
“What happened?” Jackie asked her, in English.
“Oh, they’re just downstairs looking for a bathroom,” said the mother. “They’ll be back up in a second.”
This was too much for Jackie’s English—apparently, he was fluent only when sticking to his script. “What?”
“They . . .” The mother tried switching to Chinese. But she didn’t have the words, and the more distressed she got, the more rudimentary her speech became. “One moment,” she said over and over. “Wait—can you just wait?”
But Jackie too was getting distressed. He told her, in Chinese, that the driver couldn’t keep stalling; they couldn’t block the driveway, other tourist vans had to get out.
Where were they? How long would they be?
The Harvard mother seemed to understand but couldn’t formulate a reply.
“Everyone else has to get back to Taipei,” said Jackie; “it’s not fair to keep them waiting.
” He swept his arm toward me and the Singaporean women, and we all stood stiff, unwilling props.
I tried making a sympathetic face, but I did not want to intervene.
The moment stretched, agonizing, and then at last the husband and sons ascended the stairs.
The mother hurried them out toward the bus, demanding to know why they were late.
“What’s happened?” the husband kept asking. “What’s wrong?”
“Chill,” said one of the twins. “We’re not that late.
” This was true—it was only five minutes past the meeting time.
The driver did not seem to care; he just waved us onto the bus.
But Jackie and the mother were acting like this was the worst thing that could have happened, like the whole tour had been ruined.
WE WERE ALL SUBDUED ON THE RIDE HOME. EVERYONE WAS TIRED, and everyone had to pee.
We’d drunk nine steeps of oolong tea, after all.
The physical pressure was painful—like a hot knife dug into my bladder.
Jackie told us that traffic was heavy, that they had planned to make the drive in one straight shot, but there was a clamor of protests, and we pulled off the road toward a rest stop.
When we got back on the highway, the traffic had thickened, and we sat stationary outside the city for nearly half an hour.
We would not reach Taipei 101 until past seven, Jackie announced grimly.
That was the best-case scenario; who knew how bad this traffic would get?
He was very sorry, but we had to understand this was not his fault, and he hoped it would not influence our reviews.
The Harvard mother sat slouched in the row before me, her cheek pressed against the window. Her husband asked her where she wanted to do dinner, and she snapped that she didn’t know, that he could do some trip planning for once.
“You have to take lessons,” she told her sons. “Ask that girl about her program.”
“Okay, Mom,” said one of the twins.
“No, I want you to actually ask that girl. Her Chinese is so good—ask her right now.”
“Mom,” said the other.
She sat back in her seat, arms folded. Her husband reached for her arm, but she shook him off.
I could have leaned forward and shared what I knew, that I, too, had once been so insecure about my Chinese.
I could have told them the exact tuition rates and the summer session dates and the government fellowships that would make it nearly free to attend.
I could have even told the mother that there was a private tutoring option too; that she could make a serious study of Mandarin at any time she liked, since she could obviously afford it.
But I knew they didn’t want to hear any more from me.
This wasn’t my identity crisis to manage.
I FOUND AN INDEPENDENT CINEMA CALLED SPOT IN AN OUTDOOR complex called the Huashan 1914 Creative Park, which was built on the grounds of an old sake distillery.
Huashan 1914 was frequented by both gaggles of chain-smoking teenagers buying used records and young parents pushing strollers, browsing through hand-sewn Japanese handbags.
Whoever curated films for SPOT seemed to screen things with equal interest across release dates, regions, and genres.
There was no theme; it could be Italian neorealism one day and Hong Kong martial arts cinema the next.
I began purchasing tickets to whatever film was showing that afternoon.
I wanted to find out what the Taiwanese cinephiles were into.
I ended up watching a series of three films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi: Like Nothing Happened, Passion, and I Love Thee for Good.
Hamaguchi’s films were all about how men and women want to sleep together, but things keep getting in the way.
Passion was my favorite. It was about a group of friends reuniting after college, trying to sort through their old sexual entanglements by asking each other dirty, loaded questions.
They can’t refuse to answer any questions—they have to be totally transparent.
This reminded me of many dormitory parties I’d attended over the last year.
We’d often played a game called Hot Seat, in which the person in the Hot Seat had to answer truthfully every question posed to them over the next sixty seconds.
The questions usually had to do with whom they had slept with, or wanted to sleep with, or disliked for sleeping with someone that they wanted to sleep with.
But you could never get a straight answer out of the person in the Hot Seat, no matter how specifically you worded your questions.
It was the same in Hamaguchi’s Passion. Everyone was horny but exhausted, speaking in codes, trying to communicate to just a single person that they were interested, but in a veiled way, so they wouldn’t think they were too interested.
Why was it so hard to speak plainly? What would happen if they said outright, I want to sleep with you? What if I had said to JC, I want to go home?
I found all this strangely reassuring. So not all barriers came from language.
You could be perfectly fluent in Japanese and still fail to communicate anything essential.
In Passion, there were two characters who talked in circles about their codes of ethics, their disdain for their sluttier friends, and their opposing philosophies on love for nearly two hours, and you got the sense that they despised each other, but then they had a fight in the bathroom, and the guy pushed the girl under the shower and turned it on, and it seemed very violent, and for a moment I was nervous for the girl, but then they started making out.
So language could only get you so far. Sometimes you just had to make out fully clothed in the shower.
The only trouble with Hamaguchi’s films was the subtitles.
The characters spoke in Japanese, and the screen displayed three sets of subtitles: English, Japanese, and Chinese.
I understood a little bit of all three. English I had.
Chinese I was getting close. Japanese I had tried to learn in middle school when I underwent my anime phase, and though I had forgotten almost all the complex grammar, the easy bits—sumimasen, arigatou gozaimasu, ganbatte!
—were engraved in my brain. I should have just followed along in the English.
But I had come into the theater primed to read Chinese, so when I saw the Chinese subtitles, my eyes gravitated there first. Watching a movie in triplicate was no good.
All three subtitles conveyed slightly different things.
The overall plot was intelligible, but the nuances seemed important.
For instance, there was a world of difference between “Never mind” and “You could never possibly understand.”