Three weeks into my trip to Taiwan, I went hiking with a Taiwanese man in his seventies who called himself David. The sun was just peeking over the tops of houses when we set off on a trail in Dakeng, a lush and rugged part of the island. David was one of the few English speakers I’d met, and he was keen to practice, so we were both eager for a chat. He told me he got up at four every morning to pick up trash from the side of the trails, which impressed me. We talked about his wife and son, and he introduced me to fellow hikers. Every now and then we’d stop to sip jasmine tea from our thermoses and eat lychee that we plucked straight off the trees. During one of these breaks, David asked if I wanted to marry a Chinese man or an American one.
He asked this as if it were a perfectly normal question. Well, what I really wanted was to say, “At this point, anyone will do,” but I was worried the joke would get lost in translation. Instead, I replied, “Oh, I don’t have a preference.”
This must not have sounded so great, because David looked at me in astonishment. “Don’t you have standards?” he said.
We were so high above the city that downtown Taichung looked like little squares in the early morning light. “Well,” I said, “which do you prefer?”
“Of course you should marry an American,” he huffed, as if it were a given.
“I’m American,” I said, hoping this would help him see the ridiculousness of the question.
But this only made him laugh. “No,” he said. “You’re Chinese!”
I didn’t continue the conversation further, but as we made our descent, I sped up my pace a little, as if to say, I’ll show you.
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My mother, who is from Taiwan, met my Chinese-Costa Rican father at a wedding in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The story goes that Dad asked Mom to dance, then asked for her number. For their first date, he rode his bike to her dorm, where she cooked noodles for him. He proposed to her with a ring he bought at a flea market in New Orleans. Then they flew down to Costa Rica to visit my grandma, Mamá, who gave my mother a family ring, a big round ruby with a tiny diamond in the center of it.
It’s clear to me now that, during my childhood in South Carolina, my father missed Costa Rica. Sometimes he rushed us out of Mass early so he could catch their soccer team on TV. He often reminisced about climbing up coconut trees and playing soccer barefoot in the sand, something I find hard to imagine now that he is an amusingly high-maintenance wine enthusiast. We went to Costa Rica every summer to visit his side of the family, who emigrated there from China at the turn of the twentieth century. We hiked through the rainforest, attempted to kayak in the ocean, and ate plantains with ceviche made of fish that my uncle had caught.
On the other hand, we never visited Taiwan, and my mother hardly mentioned it. In our living room, among her own watercolor paintings, were shelves and shelves of her books—Austen and Chaucer and Hemingway—from her English major at Fu Jen University. When she did talk about Taiwan, it always seemed to be in reference to living there while longing for America: that she and her friends watched Annie Hall at the cinema in Taipei, or that my grandfather, Lau-Ye, taught Mandarin to a professor from Yale. My mother is an artist and writer, and both her parents were too. I had always associated my Lau-Ye with intellect and the arts. When the communists were banging on his door in Beijing, he fled to Taiwan with only his flute and scrolls of calligraphy. In my parents’ living room are framed fans with intricate calligraphy by one of his old friends—cousin of the last emperor of China, is what my mother has told me.
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As for my sister and me, we attended the local Chinese School for such a short time that I barely remember it. Classes met in an all-Chinese church that had the worn but cheerful look of a preschool, and smelled of dirty diapers from the nursery. My mother withdrew us after three classes. She said it was because of the smell. From then on, my sister and I only attended for a month each year when we went to visit our maternal grandmother, Ama, in Los Angeles, and even then it was only for half the day, as if to meet the minimum requirements. And so, as far I as I was concerned, we were only Chinese in the summer and on some weekends. Oh, and also on Chinese New Year. During the week my sister and I went to swim team practice, read Baby-Sitters Club books, took piano lessons, and played in a tree house my dad had built in the backyard. My favorite game was to yell, “The British are coming!” and make everyone in my family stop what they were doing and head to the tree house for protection. The irony of an Asian-American family playing that the British were coming is not lost on me, but if my parents noticed this, they never brought it up. In fact, my parents were encouraging of my Patriotic pursuits, gamely eating culinary projects I made from my Colonial cookbook and sewing mob caps for my sister and me. We also made two trips to Colonial Williamsburg.
Some weekends we drove across town to buy Chinese groceries. The store we frequented was called Oriental Imports. I don’t know if this was meant to be ironic, as if the owner thought: I know, if we open up a store in the “most redneck part of town” (my father’s words) everyone will think of us as those mysterious Oriental people and want to buy our stuff! Upon first entering the store, there was the musty smell of old things: little Buddhas painted gold, dark wooden bookends carved into dragons, fine blue and white china coated in dust. There were rice cookers, DVD’s of Chinese soap operas, creams for brightening the skin. Downstairs, another smell took over: fresh whole fish and perhaps less-fresh bok choy and ginseng, and, the worst offender, dried squid in sealed plastic. (Both my parents carried these on an airplane once. “We never did it again,” my mother told me recently, “because the other passengers weren’t used to the fragrance.”) There were bottles of garlic chili oil and jars of soy bean paste, thin circles of dough for wrapping dumplings, and rows upon rows of brightly-packaged snacks and candies that we never saw in the local Publix or Earth Fare, where my parents usually shopped. My father would sometimes wander the aisles, pointing things out to us as if he, too, found them exotic. Maybe he was trying to show us something then—that our culture wasn’t something to be ashamed of or embarrassed by, but something to embrace, or at least be curious about. Or maybe he was showing us that, as we were American, he was Latin-American, and the many strange offerings at Oriental Imports were strange to him, too.
Growing up, I never had a huge interest in going to Taiwan. Because my grandparents on my mother’s side, Ama and Lau-Ye, had lived in Los Angeles my whole life, we never had any reason to go on such a long trip. Still, a part of me felt guilty. I think it had something to do with never having visited “The Motherland,” as some of my friends called it. I was hopeful that a trip would illuminate things about my mother and family, about we came from. When I returned I would understand more about what it was to be Taiwanese, and share something more with my Asian friends than simply food.
“Does your mom ever go back to Taiwan?” friends would sometimes ask me. When I said no, my guilt and curiosity were compounded by the fact that my mother herself hadn’t been there in nearly thirty years. So in the fall of 2013, armed with a travel grant from my MFA program, I decided to go.
“You can stay with my uncle! He goes hiking every day,” my mother said. I pictured someone who liked solitude, mulling things over, living close to the earth. When I floated the idea of Mom coming with me, she seemed eager about the possibility, but in the end I went alone.
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I landed in Taipei that September with only the phrases my sister and I had perfected in Chinese School. These included: “Where is the Lucky Supermarket?” (In our Chinese work books, “Lucky Supermarket” was in English and we enjoyed saying it with what we thought of as a Chinese inflection.) Other phrases included, “I like watermelon,” “You are my friend,” and “You are my very good friend.” I also knew how to say, “I don’t want that, thank you,” which was especially useful at dim sum or at the market. Once in Taipei, I caught a bus to Taichung, where my great uncle lived. Looking out the window, I couldn’t help comparing the place to The Fatherland (Costa Rica). Taiwan was as hot and humid, if not hotter, and lush tropical vegetation grew along the side of the road, which curved around mountains. Instead of skyscrapers, the streets were made up of concrete buildings, none of them very high, their signs in bold colors that would flash neon at night, so many of them packed around each other that there was little room for much else. The Taiwanese are pragmatic: Very few of the buildings were what one might call beautiful, but they got the job done.
When my great uncle, Jo Gong, and I finally found each other, he was in a sour mood from having waited for me for two hours (and I for him) because the bus had dropped me off on the other side of the building where he had been sitting in his car. I would have been grumpy too if not for all the adrenaline and excitement. Jo Gong lived on the ninth floor of a high rise building in Taichung, which is the second-largest city in Taiwan. My bedroom overlooked several buildings similar to ours, and just across the street, amidst all of the flat grey roofs, was an ornate Buddhist temple with a bright red, multi-layered facade. Outside, cars honked their horns and scooters zoomed by, while pedestrians and street food hawkers shouted at each other happily. Someone struck the temple gong a few times, the sound reverberating. I sat down on the bed and found that, instead of a mattress, it was a tatami mat. For the uninitiated, tatami is made of straw or bamboo, and as my sister said when she was little, it’s “as hard as a rock.” I was testing out my sleeping situation when Jo Gong said, “Dinner time!” in Mandarin. I understood the phrase immediately because my mother often called Chi fan! up the stairs when we were growing up.
We drove into the city. On the road were plenty of scooters, and very few rules. At stoplights, the scooters surrounded the cars on all sides, forming a confusing mass. When we arrived at the restaurant, the rest of the family was waiting for us: Yi Poh, my great aunt; her daughters Cindy and Xiao-Mei; and Xiao-Mei’s two high-school aged sons. Cindy had lived in Australia for several years, and still went by her English name.
My Taiwanese family greeted me very differently from my Costa Rican relatives, who smothered me in hugs, exclaiming Ay, mi amor! and Que linda! when they saw us. In San Jose, my sister and I were forced to kiss our cousins on not just one cheek but both cheeks. But my Taiwanese family didn’t even as much as shake my hand. They all stood in a line and looked me up and down, then proceeded to give their comments in turn, as if I were auditioning for a reality show.
“She looks okay,” said my Aunt Cindy. “Small.”
“How old is she? She still looks like a kid.”
I decided to take that as a compliment.
“She’s tan,” one of them said, with disdain.
“Americans like being tan,” my uncle explained.
It was true that I’d gotten some color over the summer.
“Her shoes look like slippers,” one of the high school boys said.
I was wearing Toms.
Cindy then tried to ask me something in Mandarin. She spoke very quickly and, I thought, in a demanding sort of way. When I had trouble replying, Jo Gong said, “She doesn’t speak Chinese.” Cindy and my cousins looked at each other, bewildered. “She doesn’t speak Chinese?” they murmured to each other. “She doesn’t speak Chinese.”
“I do…speak…a little,” I said, stumbling through the sentence even more slowly than usual in my jet-lagged haze.
They all looked at me, surprised. Then they looked at each other and laughed.
My parents had always told me that the higher up you hold your chopsticks, the classier you are, and the farther away you’ll live from your parents. “Hold them a little higher,” my father often joked. But my family in Taiwan took chopstick-shaming to a whole different level. We hadn’t been eating for much longer than ten minutes when one of my cousins said something to the effect of, “Holy shit! Look at how she’s holding them!”
“How hilarious,” said Aunt Cindy. “How is she possibly picking up anything like that?”
“She’s using them like she’s eating spaghetti,” said Jo Gong.
“What?” I tried to ask. “How should I be holding them, then?”
But I never got a reply; they couldn’t stop laughing about it. And even I had to admit it was probably easier to watch me than to try to correct years of bad habits.
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A few days later we went to Yi Po’s house for dinner. She wanted me to meet her husband, my great uncle, Yi Gong. When we arrived, he was seated at the kitchen table: a frail-looking old man with fingernails so long they curled over on the ends. A few longish white whiskers sprouted from his chin, and he was wearing an orange and tan plaid button-down shirt with “How to Bake a Cake” embroidered across the front. In addition to a bowl and an egg, the entire recipe was printed on the back.
I joined him at the table. He could only speak a bit of English, but it was enough to make him confident in striking up a conversation with me. He spoke slowly and loudly, and one of his favorite things to say was “you know…?” with know pronounced as naw.
“Eat. More. Chicken!” he said, pointing to a plate on the table. “Americans like chicken. You know?”
Everyone else looked at me for confirmation.
“I guess that’s true,” I said, as Yi Gong himself ate some.
“Oh-baaah-ma, you know?” said Yi Gong. “You know?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said. “Of course I know Obama.” Quietly, I added, “I mean, we’re not besties or anything.” When no one around you understands what you’re saying, and you’re often silent for entire meals, it’s easy to start muttering things to yourself.
After dinner, Yi Gong showed me around the house. Every room was so crammed full of stuff that, while he wasn’t looking, I took a photo. Even the bathroom was so packed—pink and white underwire bras, several bars of soap, even books and mugs and a couple nice handbags—that I had to stand at an awkward angle to wash my hands at the sink because there wasn’t enough room.
In the master bedroom, the bookshelves were piled with even more stuff. There were stacks and stacks of leather wallets and little bracelets inside plastic baggies. There was a notepad with beautiful women from the Shang Dynasty on each page, pens decorated with the Taiwanese flag, reading glasses with frames of different shapes and colors.
“Leader, it is leader!” Yi Gong said. He took one of the wallets, asking me to touch it. “Real leader!”
Yi Gong was generous. He offered me a leather coin purse, a leather notebook, and the Shang Dynasty notepad—or more like he urged me to take them: it was hard to tell which. I thanked him for the gifts. Then I sent the photo to my sister.
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We ate food from street vendors and night market hawkers and, one time, beekeepers on the side of the road when we were hiking (a tiny bee larvae that they told me was a delicacy and a good source of protein). I ate things I couldn’t identify, nearly all of them delicious. Once, at a night market, my cousin happily handed me what looked like a fudge pop, which turned out to be coagulated pig’s blood on a stick. The next morning I had food poisoning, and it was so debilitating that I spent most of the day falling in and out of sleep, unable to hold down much of anything.
I tried to tell my uncle that I’d vomited. “So I just, ah…” But what was the word for it? We hadn’t learned this one in Chinese School. There was nothing to do but make gestures like I was throwing up, complete with barfing noises. He got the message right away.
“Gan mao, gan mao!” he declared. I had to use Google Translate to see what this was. A cold.
“No!” I said. “That’s not what it is!” I quickly looked up food poisoning and showed him the Chinese characters on my laptop screen, but he shook his head fiercely. He said that he had never seen something like that before, and that it served me right for wearing shorts in cold weather.
Outside, it was in the high sixties, a respite from weeks of ninety-degree heat and full sun, but I understood. From my experience, Chinese parents like to make it seem like it’s your fault that you’re sick.
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Everyone called me by my Chinese name, which is Wu Yo Yi, or just Yo Yi. My birth certificate says Catherine, but my mother also chose Chinese names for my sister and me when we were born. Wu is my last name—my “real” last name, or at least the original one. When he immigrated, my Chinese-Costa Rican great-great grandfather changed it to Con, picking a Spanish word at random. My different name in Taiwan made me feel as if I’d taken on a new identity. Plus, my speaking was so limited that when I did speak, it was only to communicate something very necessary: “I have to go to the bathroom,” or “I’ll have the beef noodle soup.” To make up for this, I laughed easily and made exaggerated facial expressions. That way they’d know I was cheerful and lively, and, in my native tongue, an enthusiastic talker. When I became frustrated I’d sometimes just spew out a bunch of words in English, so that I probably appeared to be some incoherent foreigner.
After a while, I wanted to speak English so badly that I contacted my good friend’s brother’s ex-girlfriend, who I had never met before, and who happened to be studying abroad in Taiwan at the same time. She was an undergrad at the University of North Carolina, so I figured we at least had the South in common. “Hi Alyssa!” I wrote in an email. “I’m in Taiwan and I heard that you’re in Taiwan, and I was wondering if you wanted to go to Chung Yo mall for froyo?”
At the food court, I followed Alyssa around, my tall white tour guide who chatted away in Mandarin with mall employees and even strangers, while I, who looked Chinese, stood mute and dumb beside her. If you’re an Asian American who’s ever hung out with a white person whose Mandarin is far better than yours, well, it takes Asian American guilt to the level of Catholic guilt.
Another time, when I was walking around Sun Moon Lake with Jo Gong and the family, I overheard some European tourists speaking English with one another. I wanted to say something to them, to have a real conversation about Taiwan and what they thought of it. I was excited to see them—English speakers! But I realized that they had no reason to be excited by me; in fact, it would startle them to have this girl who looked Taiwanese, who blended in so easily, break away from her own family to strike up a conversation with strangers. So I let them pass.
Towards the end of September, I told Jo Gong that I wanted to go for a walk.
“A walk?” he said. “Okay, wait a minute. I’ll take you.”
“Well, I just thought I would go by myself.”
He looked taken aback. “Alone!” he exclaimed. “But why?”
Oh, I just need some alone time, I wanted to say. But how do you communicate something like that when it’s not just about words, it’s about a concept that might seem straight-up weird, even insulting, to a region where the group is more important than the self?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just want to walk by myself.”
After a while he looked at me as if he’d had an epiphany. “Oh!” he said. “I know why. You go alone to—” and here, he tapped his head a few times with his index finger, “Think, think, think.”
Under guise of a contemplative scholar, I headed out, on my own in Taiwan at last. But when I took a seat at the café, I felt paranoid that someone would come up to me and ask about the book I was reading (I’d brought along Capote’s In Cold Blood), and I wouldn’t be able to reply. I noticed too that no one else was reading—Boston has spoiled me this way, being a city where everyone is always reading something. I felt out of place, which was unexpected. In South Carolina I’d often feel self-conscious because I knew I looked different. But in Taiwan, I was self-conscious because I knew I looked like everyone else, but I couldn’t communicate. In terms of fitting in, what matters more: the language or the looks?
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Everyone loved to shop. The sheer variety of things you could buy at a night market was overwhelming: cute cell phone cases and earrings shaped like ladybugs, faux leather flats and pastel-colored dishware, all within a few inches of each other. A few feet away, the food vendors were selling bowls of fried pork dumplings or refreshing drinks made of lemon and barley. “You didn’t buy anything?” my family would say, when I showed up empty-handed after a walk around the block. “You don’t want any shoes? Clothes? Jewelry? There aren’t any stores open this late in Boston?” When I shook my head no, they looked at each other, confused. “Then what do you do at night?”
My great aunt, Yi Po, wanted to take me shopping all the time, and, despite not being physically affectionate, she often guided me with her hands. Even now I can remember the feeling of her fingers closing onto my forearm, pulling me this way and that. I ended up having to buy another suitcase just to fit all the gifts she bought for me. At a history museum, Yi Po urged me to buy a comb made of Taiwanese wood for my mother, saying that she would really like it, that she could use the handle to massage her shoulders. I pictured my mom with her purple plastic hairbrush and salon products, her massage appointments. In the end, I did buy the comb, but not for her. It was an exotic souvenir to give to a friend.
Towards the end of my trip I went to Taipei again, this time to visit my mother’s friend, Sammy. Before my trip, Mom had suggested I go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and pick up a scarf for Sammy at the gift shop. I couldn’t imagine that any of the locals in Taichung would think this was a good idea. “Why would you buy anything at a museum?” I could imagine them saying. “And especially a scarf! How much was it?” How much was it? was their favorite question about my stuff. And even when I shared prices that, in Boston, had been a steal, the response was always the same: “Sixty-five dollars? You can get that for fifteen dollars at the night market.”
For the record, Sammy loved the scarf.
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Throughout the trip, Jo Gong would ask me, “Why you come to Taiwan?” And when introducing me to someone and explaining about my writing grant, he would relish the chance to ask me again: “But why? Why are you here?” It was a question that had begun to turn existential. I hadn’t written any concrete goals, so even my trip proposal was vague. And then, before I could respond, he’d say, “Oh, I know, you come to find your mother root!”
Jo Gong was bent on finding my mother’s roots. “This one! This is your mother’s house,” he said, proud to have found it, parking the car just outside. It was near a bustling intersection, across the street from a park so small that it was more a suggestion of a park, a bit of green for a city-dweller to rest her eyes before heading into town. Looking at the house, I tried to picture her living there, opening the front door in a new dress. But it wasn’t easy. I’d only ever seen her living in the States.
Later that day, Jo Gong took me to a temple in Tainan, a city on the west coast of Taiwan. On the outside, the temple was simple and lovely, and Buddhist monks walked the grounds in brown robes. Inside, gleaming black columns had Chinese characters painted on them in gold. I was pleased and surprised when Jo Gong told me that this was the calligraphy of my grandfather, Lau-Ye.
“What do they say?” I asked.
Jo Gong looked at them for a time. They were poems, he said finally, that were too complicated to explain.
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Towards the end of my trip we called my grandmother, Ama, in Los Angeles. She came on the line uncertainly, in English, as she usually did. “Hello? Yo-yi? How are you?”
I replied, in Mandarin, that I was doing well, that we were at Yi Po’s house, and had just come back from a walk.
“Wah!” Ama exclaimed, astonished at my sudden language skills. She asked me question after question about my time there, and her voice was unlike it had ever been since my Lau-Ye’s death a few years before. Now that we were speaking in Mandarin she spoke faster and more excitedly, her voice taking on a melodic lilt that it didn’t have in English. It felt so good to be speaking Mandarin with someone who was patient and encouraging of my elementary vocabulary, and for the first time, I felt I’d reached a conversational level—albeit a very basic one—of speaking.
Once I left Taiwan it was hard to keep it up. I had no one to practice with. It was easier for Mom and me to speak English because we had been doing it all our lives. Before my grandmother passed away, our conversations had reverted entirely to English again. But I am grateful for that one phone call. Finally, she must have been thinking, my granddaughter can speak to me in my own language.
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Sometime later, for Stand Up 101 class at Improv Boston Comedy School, I told my classmates a bit about my trip and my uncle’s phrase, “mother root.” I yanked an invisible plant out of the ground, like it was ginger or a carrot, and brandished it in the air. “I have found it!” I exclaimed. “The rarest of the rare, the Mother Root!”
I’m hoping they found this at least a little bit funny.
But what did that even mean, to find my mother’s roots? What do I know about my mother? She loves to eat and she loves to shop. She loves to read and write, in English. As a real estate investor, she has struck out on her own, and she is tough, confident, and precise. She loves theatre, symphonies, art museums. She herself did not marry a Chinese man, but an American one—as my hiking partner had suggested I do. My father is Latin-American the way I am American: he speaks fluent Spanish, he has a loud and wild laugh, he can be prone to excessive nostalgia. The search for my mother’s roots led me, in some ways, back to where it started: it proved all the more that my mother is American. She and my father made the choice to be American, and they did it for me, for my sister, so that we would be American, too—not foreigners.
I went to Asia to try to become more Asian, and also to learn more about my mother. In some ways, perhaps I did. I came back with a lot of beautiful Taiwanese clothes, a slightly more robust Mandarin vocabulary, and improved chopstick technique. We were not only Chinese on weekends and holidays, after all: Would a non-Asian-American allow her great aunt to hold her arm for an entire day, on the bus and in the elevator, and even inside the house? Or eat a baby bee because it was a gift and a delicacy, and therefore, the right thing to do? But I also returned with the understanding that a two-month trip could not outdo years of being American, and the same held true for my mother.
In my twenties, whenever my parents would talk about how they didn’t get to see my sister and me enough, I’d retort that they had each moved completely out of the countries where their own parents were. But my mother always said that she had no desire to see her children stay close behind her, adding some sentimental phrase about wanting us to spread our wings and fly. She said this even as she was shedding tears about us living so far away, even as she remembered what it was like to fly far from her own mother. Whenever we found ourselves in one of the few Chinese restaurants in Greenville, my mother would look over at my sister and me. “Hold them higher,” she’d say. “Hold your chopsticks higher.”