Chapter 6 #5
I COULDN’T TELL IF I WAS GETTING BETTER OR WORSE AT CHINESE, only that my utterances were getting stranger.
In my one-on-one class, I had decided to stop trying to contort my thoughts to fit assigned grammar patterns.
Instead of answering questions with the straightforward constructions suggested by the textbook, I would manipulate whatever building blocks I had to express whatever I was thinking about at the moment.
When I didn’t have a concept, I would talk around it until Teacher Sun figured out what I was trying to say.
Teacher Sun asked me if I believed in reincarnation, and I didn’t know how to say “the immortality of the soul,” so I said: “Can a soul come back? What is it coming back from? What is a soul? What is it made out of? Is it memory? Without memory, is a person a person?”
“Aha,” said Teacher Sun. She wrote a phrase on the board: 靈魂不滅. The soul is immortal—literally, the soul does not perish.
THE CITY AND ALL ITS SYMBOLS DIDN’T GIVE ME HEADACHES ANYMORE.
I no longer felt any pressure to breach that wall of meaning.
I’d gotten comfortable with incomprehension, and I felt this looseness in my bones.
All the tendons relaxed in my jaw. I didn’t mind if I couldn’t decipher a street sign or a passing conversation.
Perceptions were like clear water running through my mind.
They came and went, but nothing stuck. No more of this panicked scramble for meaning.
I could hold on to an observation, blink at it, and then let it go.
Teacher Sun taught me a nice phrase: 沈澱—chéndiàn, “to settle.” I looked it up in the dictionary.
It was a chemistry term—to settle, to precipitate.
Teacher Sun used it to talk about my emotions.
She told me she thought I was looking calmer, less distressed these days.
She gestured with one hand like a cup, and with the other imitated a spoon swirling a liquid inside.
I thought it meant that I was sinking into depression, but she said that settling wasn’t a bad thing.
“Water is clearer after the dust has settled,” she said.
“It means that you sort out all the bad and dirty things. You just wait, and then slowly, things fall into place.”
I SAW A 1982 FILM CALLED NOMAD BY THE HONG KONG DIRECTOR Patrick Tam.
As usual, I had known nothing about the film going in, and for the first hour I thought it was just a romantic comedy about four Hong Kong youths goofing around on an island: Louis, Kathy, Pong, and the improbably named Tomato.
But then Kathy’s ex-boyfriend Shinsuke shows up from Japan.
You think he’s trying to win Kathy back, but the stakes are higher than that.
Shinsuke is being hunted by the Japanese Red Army, a group of communist terrorists from which he defected.
Shinsuke tries to get Kathy to hide him, but the Japanese Red Army tracks him down, and then most of the characters wind up dead.
A harpoon gun is involved. The moral of the story is that you can’t escape history.
You can cut yourself adrift and pretend it has nothing to do with you, but then a terrorist might come along and make your ex-boyfriend do seppuku on the beach.
My grief was not that special. Andrew had had a point, that night in the bar.
Ask around and every first-, second-, even third-generation Asian American had a sob story somewhere in the family tree.
The booms in migration that landed our parents in the US all had to do with Cold War devastations.
Mainlander? Someone got got in the Cultural Revolution.
Mainlander in the eighties? Someone was fleeing Beijing after the Tiananmen Square massacre—well, that, or someone got into graduate school.
Vietnamese? Saigon fell, and then everyone was piling onto boats.
Hmong, Laotian, Cambodian? Forget about it.
History mangled everyone. We weren’t the only ones cursed. And my personal tragedy derived not from the fact that it had happened but the fact that no one had thought to include me in this story—the child’s indignation that this was not all about me.
ANOTHER KLOOK NOTIFICATION FOR A RESERVATION I HAD FORGOTTEN about: a day trip to Yehliu Geopark. I’d also forgotten what Yehliu Geopark was, or why we’d found it interesting enough to book this trip, but I didn’t have anything better to do that weekend.
My driver was Jackie. “Hello!” He seemed not to recognize me. “Just us today?”
The small-group vehicle could fit up to six, but I was the only one who had shown up. It was a day of record-breaking heat, the third consecutive day on which this record had been broken. Probably everyone else had chosen to stay near the AC.
I showed Jackie my reservation code and mentioned I’d been on his Pinglin tea tour.
“Okay, fantastic!” He gave no indication of whether he remembered me or not. He persisted in speaking to me in English, even though I’d been responding in Chinese. “You are traveling alone?”
“I guess, yeah.”
“Taipei is a great place to travel alone. Very safe!”
Jackie put on his Taiwanese pop playlist, and off we went.
“Teresa Teng,” he told me, gesturing to the radio.
I gathered this was the name of the singer.
“You know Teresa Teng? It’s very sad. She died in Thailand, just forty-two.
” I asked Jackie how she had died, and he shook his head. “We’ll never know.”
Yehliu Geopark was on a small cape just off the coast of Taiwan’s northern tip. The beach was dotted with dark, lumpy rocks, stretching out of the sand like squiggling worms trying to break free.
“Hoodoo stones,” said Jackie.
I didn’t know this word. “Voodoo?”
“No, hoodoo.” Jackie pulled up a definition on his phone and passed it over to me.
The word was indeed “hoodoo”: a tall, thin spire of rock created over millions of years of erosion.
Yehliu Geopark had some of the most distinctive hoodoo stones in the world, Jackie told me.
People came from all over to see these stones.
He left me at the park entrance with two bottles of water and a printed map of Yehliu Geopark’s most iconic rock formations. “I will meet you here in one hour.” He pointed to a café across the parking lot. He stressed the traffic situation on the way back, and I promised him I would not be late.
I wandered slowly through the rocks, taking care to sip from my water bottle every few minutes.
The advice was to always keep your lips wet—that was how you warded off stealth dehydration.
It had reached over a hundred degrees outside, under the kind of clear, blinding sky that produced a ringing in your ears, and I was one of very few people on the island.
The other tourists included an Asian couple armed with hydration backpacks and three excitable German women.
If I positioned myself just so between the rock formations, I could block them from view.
Then it was like I was the only life-form present.
I had reached not only to the other side of the world but to another planet, another realm entirely, where there was no language to speak, no symbols in the air, only waves breaking against the rocks.
I followed the trail on Jackie’s map until I had identified and photographed every rock formation.
There was a Fairy Shoe, a Beehive, a Tofu Rock, and a set of Sea Candles.
I learned that the most famous formation was the Queen’s Head, which to me resembled a Nefertiti head: the long arc of its neck, and the voluminous crown jutting out the back.
Erosion was a big problem, according to my map.
The Queen’s Head’s neck had whittled at an alarming rate; she would likely not survive the decade.
“Schlep,” said one of the Germans, making a gesture like a guillotine across her neck.
But all was not lost. There was a successor rock: the Cute Princess, which had the same elongated neck, though a less defined profile. Tourists were encouraged to flock to the Cute Princess for pictures, so as to leave the Queen’s Head alone and delay her decapitation by another five or so years.
MY MOTHER CONTINUED TO CALL EVERY FEW DAYS TO GIVE UPDATES on the situation in Guangzhou, but she never seemed able to talk for long.
It was her first time back in China in several years, and her sisters kept taking her on day trips out of the city, making up for lost time.
She sent photos every morning. So far they had hiked up a mountain, gone to a spa, and taken photographs while dressed up in the traditional garb of some unspecified ethnic minority.
She and her oldest sister, my dayi, struck the same pose everywhere they went: side by side, outside arms stretched over their heads, meeting in the middle to form a heart.
My mother didn’t want to talk about how Popo was doing, but she did want to talk about a Taiwanese author named Chiung Yao.
Chiung Yao had been widely beloved for her romance novels.
She had killed herself last winter, but it wasn’t tragic or anything.
That was how my mother put it. It was planned.
She had been approaching ninety, and she just wanted to exit this life with dignity.
Chiung Yao was born in the same year as Popo, and so if I wanted to know more about my grandparents’ histories, she suggested, I should read Chiung Yao’s wartime memoirs. There was a good YouTube video on this subject. She would send me a link.
“Wow,” I said. “Did they know each other?”
“No, but she was from their same generation.”
“Were they both from Guangzhou?”
“No, Chiung Yao was from Chengdu. But parts of the journey are the same. At least, emotionally. Just read it. You wanted to know more about their histories, didn’t you?”
Someone else’s memoir. I felt a knot in my stomach. Was this as close as I was ever going to get?