Chapter 7 #3
“Of course!” Her expression closed. “If you want corrections on your Chinese, or anything like that, then you will have to arrange private tutoring rates with the program office. But I don’t do private tutoring, so you will probably be paired with a different teacher.
” She glanced at the clock. “Okay—that’s time. Bye-bye, Lily! Have a safe trip home!”
I left the room embarrassed. I felt rejected, somehow. Had I completely misread our relationship?
But I couldn’t hold it against her. Teacher Sun sat for eight hours each day with students tripping through their vocabulary, weeping over their essays.
She had assumed a parental presence for me, and this was perhaps part of her pedagogical approach—the more comfortable and confident I felt, the more risks I took.
She had watched me learn to express myself, to become emotionally articulate, to become a person in Chinese.
She understood this. And she probably knew that, for the sake of easy detachment, it was better to pretend she didn’t.
WE HAD TO TAKE AN EXIT EXAM BEFORE THE OFFICE WOULD ISSUE our transcripts.
It didn’t count for our grades; it was just meant to track our improvement.
It was online, so Anna and I took it at Youmoutoohana.
That was our final evening at the corner table, sipping osmanthus barley tea and listening to a Japanese-accented cover of “Englishman in New York.”
At first, I thought I had been given the wrong link. The exit exam appeared to be the exact same test as the entry exam: same example sentences, same reading comprehension passages. I tried the link several times, but each time the questions looked the same.
I found the earlier questions harder this time.
Before, I had clicked rapidly through whatever answers sounded right.
Now I was using reason over intuition, and this cast more doubt on everything, and so when I reached the reading comprehension section I had even less time than I had on my first go.
I scrolled down to that menacing wall of text, and my instinct was to shrink away.
But I had been chipping at walls of text all summer now.
My eyes tracked to the first character, then the next, and on and on I slid, breaking the code bit by bit.
It was all legible to me. My panic ebbed, and the story unveiled itself.
It was that letter from a student to her parents about how all the things in her room had gotten wrecked.
The passage was not about a mental breakdown after all.
Nor was it about a thief. She was writing to her parents about a storm.
She had left the window open while she was out with her friends, and the wind had blown in and scattered all her belongings on the floor.
She only thought it was a thief. But nothing was taken.
The passage was funny, not tragic. The damage had not been that bad.
I WOKE UP ONE LAST TIME IN THE TINY APARTMENT ON YONGKANG Street.
Anna had left on a flight to the mainland the previous night; she was visiting her father’s sister’s family in Guizhou.
She had confessed to me that she was dreading the trip.
It would be two weeks of stifling heat in the countryside, of banquet dinners amid clouds of fruit flies and freshly slaughtered chickens; an endless procession of elders she had to greet and pretend she remembered.
But at least now she could communicate. At least when people asked her what she was studying, she could say more than “math.”
I cleared out the refrigerator, which was packed with the stale onigiri left over from our typhoon stockpile.
I washed the teacups one by one and placed them in the cupboard.
I collected my last batch of laundry from the couch.
It was still slightly damp, but there was nothing I could do about that.
I bagged up the last haul of used toilet paper and brought it downstairs to the bins.
I had a long look around the place before I closed the door.
The sheets resembled a crime scene—two vibrantly clear yellow body prints of ten weeks of sweat, sunscreen, and insect repellent.
We had slept here for seventy-five nights, and never once had we changed the sheets, because they were too big to stuff into the washer/dryer. I felt proud of our resilience.
Lee offered to help me arrange a cab, but I took the train.
I knew the route by heart: the red line all the way to Taipei Main Station and the airport express train from there.
It did add half an hour of travel time, but it was so much cheaper.
On my way down the escalator I rolled my eyes at all the tourists coming up the other way, who did not know to stand on the right if they weren’t going to walk.
TAIPEI TAOYUAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO BOSTON LOGAN INTERNATIONAL Airport, by way of San Francisco.
I ate a bowl of egg yolk and scallop congee in the pre-security food court, and then I went to my gate.
I had a few hundred dollars of scholarship cash left over.
I wanted to spend it all on souvenirs. The rates at the airport cash exchange were exorbitant, and I didn’t know if I’d ever be back to take it out of my account if I left it here.
After I passed security I browsed the National Palace Museum gift shop near my gate.
Teacher Cai told us about this trick on our last day of class—if you didn’t have suitcase space for valuables, then check your bag and do your souvenir shopping after security.
I counted my cash and chose a set of gifts that would add up almost precisely to that total: some cases of florals-infused oolong tea for my roommates, jade bookmarks for Flora, a miniature Jadeite Cabbage sculpture for Jasmine, and a set of porcelain teacups for my parents.
The woman at the counter asked if I had come back to visit family, and I explained I had come to study Chinese.
“Whatever for?” she asked. “Your Chinese is excellent.”
I demurred, using the standard phrase my parents had taught me long ago for accepting compliments: 哪裡哪裡, which literally meant “Where? Where?” Where is the excellent Chinese? Not here.
I knew my Chinese was not good. I still couldn’t read prose with the ease I wanted, and I couldn’t interpret at something like a business conference without extensive preparation.
Perhaps I sounded fluent in everyday conversation, but even that wouldn’t last. I was less than twenty-four hours out of the classroom, and I could already feel the dissolution of my newly formed synapses.
I was still reviewing my flash cards, but the terms felt pointless out of context.
Did it matter now that I knew the term for nuclear fission? For pouring old wine into new jugs?
Still, I treasured the memory of that fluency. I had felt it here, briefly. I knew it was possible. If I came back, if I kept trying, if I sank into this life again, if I put myself under such insane discipline, it was possible I could get it back.
When I arrived at my gate, I saw that the same two students were on my return flight—the girl who had been wearing the Harvard sweater and the boy she’d been flirting with. I hadn’t seen them all summer. Taipei was not so tiny after all; our paths had never crossed.
They were standing very close together. I couldn’t tease out their relationship.
They weren’t strangers to each other anymore, but they didn’t seem like a couple either.
There was a casual physical intimacy between them that hadn’t been there before.
She leaned toward him to make a joke. He laughed and mussed her hair.
They looked different. The phrase “gone native” came to mind. The boy had bleached his hair a bright copper. The girl wore loose baggy pants, perhaps even the very pair I had seen on display in the Japanese atelier on Yongkang Street.
The girl caught me watching them. Her gaze lingered on me a moment, and it seemed she recognized me too.
I wondered if the same questions were going through her head—whether I’d had the same summer itinerary, whether I was judging them, whether I was visiting Boston or coming home.
I knew they hadn’t attended my program, which meant they must have done one of the easier programs. I tried to feel superior about this but couldn’t.
The flight attendant asked me what I would like to drink in English, and when I responded in Chinese, the words felt forced.
I had gone back to pretending, the way I pretended at Chinese restaurants.
All the other conversations around me were happening in English.
I was on a plane full of returnees: immigrant parents and children come back to visit family for the summer.