Loveboat, Taipei

by Abigail Hing Wen

  Back at the Cleveland airport, Dad had taken my arm and murmured, “Safe travels.” It’s a ritual, left over from family lore—the great-uncle who went to Germany and never returned, the niece lost at sea—like throwing a pinch of salt over your shoulder. If we neglect it, misfortune might ensue. It’s always been us saying it to Dad as we dropped him off.

  But I’d snatched back my arm. Marched through security, ignoring the paranoid twang that comes from that family immigrant history—what if he dies before I come home?

  And what if I get lost and can’t get back?

  What if I get kidnapped?

  What is everyone saying?

  What have I done?

  My breath comes fast and shallow.

  Don’t panic.

  I just need to make it through this airport, then I can bury myself in character charts and try not to think of Pearl being 7,627 miles away or Megan dancing in Public Square with Cindy Sanders who’s taking my place in the parade, or Dan—I can’t think of him. With any luck, I’ll hide under the radar of my Chinese school prison guard and won’t have to speak to anyone for eight weeks.

  At a booth, an officer behind glass blasts me in Mandarin.

  “I’m sorry.” I hand him my American passport. “I don’t speak.” Frowning, he takes a mug shot, scans my index fingers, hands back my passport, and waves me through.

  Somehow, I make it to the luggage carousel, where Dad’s whale-sized suitcase revolves in a loop. I squeeze between two travelers arguing in Mandarin and drag my suitcase free—it’s heavier than I remember—then I’m jostling along with another herd of travelers into an arrival hall, flowing with a river of more Asian people than I’ve ever seen.

  Panic!

  A sea of faces rushes me, crowds waving cardboard signs printed with blocky characters and names in English. Someone cries a greeting and jostles me from behind, and then I’m falling, and then caught by a steel rail that divides me from the crowds: women in stylish blouses, men in beige slacks, though it’s hot enough to melt crayons on the floor. And humid. My shirt and hair are plastered to my body already.

  I make my way past the crowds and outside into a blast of sunlight. Horns honk. Oddly squarish cars rush by, their roar splitting my head into four.

  “Chien Tan?” I ask a woman with another sign. “I’m looking for—”

  A claw-like hand grips my shoulder, connected to a man with no hair and a face like a horse. The stench of cigarettes and cilantro breaks over me.

  “Nǐ yào qù nǎlǐ?”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Nǐ yào qù nǎlǐ?”

  His grip tightens. Panic overrides all remaining sense.

  “No!” I rip free, whirl about-face, hell-bent on retracing my steps back onto my plane.

  But two policemen in blue guard the exit.

  And then my luggage, heavy with inertia, keeps twisting me round, tipping my world. My ankle gives way—then the pavement rushes to meet me, no railing this time to prevent me from making an undignified Ever-shaped splat on the ground.

  A yell rips from my throat.

  My suitcase yanks itself free.

  Then a firm hand on my upper arm stops me inches from the ground. I eyeball a pair of blue jeans–clad legs. Black Nikes.

  “Whoa, there,” he says, and I gape up at an angle at the most handsome guy I’ve ever seen.

  5

  The guy hauls me to my feet as if I weigh no more than a monkey. I feel like a monkey—a clumsy one in desperate need of a shower, hair-combing, and breath mints.

  “You all right?” he asks. “Jet lag’s pretty bad off these flights. It’s four in the morning for us.”

  He’s making excuses for my emotional wreckedness; for looking like I just got spit out of a jet engine—and it’s the kindness of this stranger that undoes me. As he releases my arm, I dash it over my damp eyes.

  His jet-black hair is rumpled into careless spikes, like he doesn’t need to bother with first impressions. He’s paired an olive-green shirt with hip-hugging jeans that mean he either has very good taste, or knows someone who has. He’s tall and leanly buff—I’ve never seen a real-life guy with so much prime real estate in arm muscles.

  “Hi—hi!” I stammer wittily. “Um, hi!”

  He tugs an earphone free. It sings with a homey Beatles song that reminds me of closing down the Patio Grill, where I worked last summer, only there has never been a guy like him there.

  “Are you Ever Wong?” He rights my suitcase with a firm thud and scowls. “You’re an hour late. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Five minutes into the ride to Chien Tan, I realize there’s something familiar about Rick Woo of the swoon-worthy arms. Is it his name? Face? Maybe I’m loopy from jet lag, but surely I’d have remembered an Asian guy of his sheer size and bulk. He takes up half our bench, which creaked and sagged toward him when he sat beside me. He moves with a sense of controlled—almost graceful—power, as if he’s never taken a wrong step in his life. Meanwhile, my upper arm slowly purples with his handprint, a reminder that I nearly wiped out before him and every occupant of this fifteen-passenger van.

  “Have we met before?” I venture.

  “No.” Rick falls into a silence that doesn’t invite further conversation, his initial kindness evaporated like a splash of water left behind on the airport pavement. He fidgets with his cell phone, which isn’t getting a signal. It drops and he swears and picks it up again, removing and reinserting his tiny SIM card. Oh, no. I forgot to buy one at the airport like Dad told me to. I’ve never been as addicted to my phone as my classmates, but now I can’t even make a desperate lifeline call to Megan.

  Upside: I don’t have to take calls from Mom and Dad either.

  Rick restarts his phone. His knee jiggles and he drapes his thick-wristed arm over it, running his thumb along the inside of his fingers in an odd, fidgety gesture. His wall of silence would have felt less awkward if the other kids weren’t jabbering a mile a minute around us, as they have since I slipped into my seat.

  Is he really that annoyed they had to wait so long for me?

  Li-Han, our driver who is also, apparently, head counselor, meets my eyes in his rearview mirror. He’s about ten years older than us, rail-thin under his fluorescent-yellow Chien Tan shirt, with a thick shock of black hair, black-rimmed glasses, and a bulldoggish jaw. He speaks in Mandarin, and with a jolt, I catch my Chinese name—Ai-Mei—which he’d used to check me off his list. Ai: love, and Mei: beauty, which has always felt less pretentious in Chinese. But no one but my grandpa, who named me, ever used it in real life, and he passed away when I was four.

  On Rick’s other side, by the door, a beautiful girl with pencil-straight black hair spilling over her creamy shoulders wraps up her flirting match with a hawk-nosed guy named Marc. Beside him is a prematurely graying guy named Spencer Hsu, who apparently is taking a gap year to work on a Senate campaign this fall. I haven’t gotten the girl’s name yet, and I feel a pang, wishing Megan were here—everyone seems to know each other already.

  The van jolts over a pothole as the girl leans over Rick. Her heart-shaped face tapers to a cleft chin. Dark-brown eyes curl ever so slightly down either side of her nose. Her tangerine dress tightens against generous curves and could have come off a runway—by comparison, my lilac V-neck shirt over jean cutoffs feels grungy. Even if I’d changed before deplaning, I don’t own anything half as nice.

  “Hey, there. Li-Han wants us to do icebreakers. Whatever. I’m Sophie Ha—yes, like haha! It’s Korean—my grandfather was Korean. I’m from Manhattan, but I live in New Jersey now. My parents split up and sent me here for the summer, but I’d have come anyways. Where are you from?”

  “Um, Ohio.” Aren’t Asians supposed to be reserved? But she’s so open. And she glitters. Sunlight glints off three earrings on her left earlobe, a contrast to my modest single studs. She somehow reminds me of a combination of Megan and Pearl.

  “Cool.” She props an elbow on Rick’s shoulder l
ike he’s a big pillow. His wide, arched forehead and soft nose remind me of my cousin, though his irises are amber instead of brown, closer to the color of his skin. Why does he look familiar? Headphones, shaggy hair, athletic build . . . there’s a resemblance between Sophie and Rick. The shape of their eyes, the full lips.

  “Are you guys related?”

  “Cousins,” she confirms, and I can’t help envying all the benefits that must come with a hot boy-cousin your age, like a built-in network of guy friends, a sounding board for your unrequited crushes. “We went to the same high school. I was a cheerleader. I’m headed to Dartmouth.”

  “Oh, cool—I dance. Um. Dance squad. Ballet.”

  “Cool. Rick’s off to Yale”—she rolls her head charmingly—“to play football.” She kneads his shoulder and pretends to cheer, “Rah rah sis boom bah!”

  “Quit it, Sophie.” He slumps against his seat, frown deepening, looking out the window. “We’ve hit rush hour.”

  “I give up.” She sighs. “Even I can take only so much of your sulking.”

  Wait a minute . . .

  Yale.

  Football.

  Woo.

  “You!” I blurt.

  Rick frowns. “What?”

  When I was nine, Dad showed me a photo in the World Journal: the skinny Chinese boy with the birthday just five days after mine, with bear-like brows that have since spread proportionately over the forehead of the guy beside me. Woo Guang-Ming (Bright Light, family name first) of New Jersey had won the national spelling bee, when I didn’t even know a round existed beyond my fourth-grade silver-medal victory. Maybe you should put more effort into spelling, Mom suggested.

  When we turned twelve, Woo Guang-Ming had his piano debut in Lincoln Center. You should practice more! Harder!

  At fourteen, he won the Google Science Fair for some machine learning algorithm. How can you go to medical school with a B in biology? We’d lived the same number of years on this earth, and he’d achieved four times as much.

  I told myself he had no soul. He spewed algebraic formulas on command. His fingers were sausage-swollen from his mom’s chopsticks coming down on them at the keyboard.

  The only time I didn’t want Boy Wonder struck down by lightning was when he quit piano to warm the football team’s bench freshman year. The World Journal was worried, my parents devastated. Who does he think he is, Tom Brady? Will he not go to college?

  I rejoiced. For once, Guang-Ming had done something off the beaten path (for an immigrant Asian American kid). And sitting on the bench—a waste of time by World Journal standards. It was the end of the Guang-Ming dynasty and I’d never have to run into a clip of his latest article placed on my pillow again.

  But then Boy Wonder got recruited as a running back for Yale, not the best football team, but who in the readership of the World Journal cared? It was Yale. He skyrocketed again in my parents’ esteem and plummeted in mine. The only other World Journal prodigy I remember half as well died by suicide. His grieving parents commemorated him with a full page spread of his résumé.

  “What?” Boy Wonder repeats.

  Here he is. The yardstick for my never-measuring-up life, in the flesh.

  “Nothing,” I say, and Boy Wonder’s frown deepens.

  “Never met an Ever before.” Sophie smooths things over. “Is it a nickname?”

  “For Everett.” I really wish Boy Wonder wasn’t between us joggling his arm and leg, putting me on edge.

  Sophie’s brow wrinkles. “Isn’t Everett—”

  “Did you want to trade seats?” Boy Wonder cuts her off, scooting from me. Sophie raises a brow. I flush. Do I smell?

  “We’ll be on campus in like, five minutes. Calm down. Poor Ever will think you’re like this all the time.” Boy Wonder shoves his phone into his pocket and makes a fist that pops his veins out on his tan arm. What the heck is his hurry anyways?

  Sighing, Sophie turns back to me. “So Everett’s—”

  “A boy’s name, yeah.” My flush deepens, my usual embarrassment quadrupled. I don’t want to keep talking over Boy Wonder and annoying him. “My parents didn’t realize it was.” To which most respond, “How could they not?”

  Boy Wonder glances at me. “Guess Everett sounds like Bernadette or Juliette. Easy mistake.”

  I’m surprised. He understood. Sometimes things that should be straightforward—like what’s a boy’s versus girl’s name, or why your entire self-worth isn’t at stake when you let down your parents—just aren’t. If you didn’t grow up like I did.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  Not that this makes up for him being the bane of my existence.

  “What’s it mean anyways?” he asks.

  Why am I so weirdly fascinated by the stubble on his jaw?

  “Brave as a boar. Remember, I didn’t pick it.”

  “Ever the Brave Boar. I like it,” he says.

  I can’t help a small snort. He can’t mean it.

  “No, really. Better than my name. Came from The Sound of Music. Friedrich. My little sister’s Liesl.”

  I press my lips together, then admit, “That’s hilarious.”

  He groans. “No, it’s not. We had to watch the movie a hundred times and every time, my parents would say”—he waves a hand jazz-style—“‘That’s how we got your name!’ My sister got so sick of it she changed her name to Shelly last year in fifth grade.”

  I can’t help smiling. “She sounds a little like my sister.” And a family that picks names out of an old but decent musical—not what I’d have expected for Boy Wonder.

  He looks out the windshield, knee still jiggling, thumb running under his fingers, bored again with this mortal conversation.

  Okay, fine. I face out my own window, my cheeks heated. The world feels jarringly off, as if I’ve dropped into a parallel universe, crowded with strange, squarish cars, oblong street signs, speed limits in kilometers, and Chinese characters. Then the elevated highway lifts us into tree-covered mountains. Mint-and-orange pagodas jut through the leaves: square, tiered roofs with corners flared like swallowtail wings, stacked in towers that shrink as they ascend. Like my favorite jewelry box Dad brought from a trip to Singapore, expanded to house-sized proportions.

  Toto, I’m not in Ohio anymore—and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Disoriented, still mad, but also . . . intrigued.

  “Ai-Mei, nǐ xūyào tíng xiàlái zuò shénme ma?” Li-Han says.

  “I, uh, sorry, I don’t understand—”

  “He’s asking if you need to stop at a store for anything,” Boy Wonder says.

  I flush. I don’t need his help. “Oh, uh, no. No, I don’t. And it’s Ever. No one calls me Ai-Mei.”

  Boy Wonder responds in fluent Mandarin, conveying my answer, and then some. He even pulls off the elder-speak demeanor shift—his tone more deferential and respectful.

  Of course he does.

  Maybe it’s the universe’s idea of a cruel joke that on this trip, which my parents have forced on me, I’ve bumped right up against their measuring stick.

  “If you speak Mandarin already”—I can’t keep the acid from my voice—“why’d your parents make you come?”

  “Oh, they didn’t.” His amber eyes flicker to me. “I came on my own. Sophie and I have family here, so we visit every summer.”

  Boy Wonder chose to attend Chinese summer school. Enough said.

  “It’s different when you’re at Chien Tan, of course,” Sophie says. “What about you? Why’d you decide to come?”

  “I didn’t.” My voice pitches slightly. “My parents made me.”

  Sophie laughs. “Well, no one’s making you do anything here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Our cousins have done this program,” Sophie whispers. “Best kept secret. Zero supervision.”

  Oh, really? “So what does—”

  Boy Wonder flicks a warning finger toward Li-Han, who probably understands a lot more English than he lets on.

  “Tell
you later,” Sophie whispers.

  I want to ask more, but our van pulls into a driveway, past a concrete slab bearing two Chinese characters. To our left, a red pagoda building—the largest I’ve ever seen—rises from the mountains. To the right, a guard salutes from his booth and a wooden bar lifts to let us through.

  “Chien Tan,” Li-Han announces.

  I peer anxiously out the window as Li-Han narrates in Mandarin. A pond laced with giant lily pads gurgles with fountains. Our van winds toward a small campus of redbrick buildings with rows of two-paneled windows. More Asian American kids my age bump a volleyball in a grassy courtyard surrounded by lush shrubbery, and beside a rock carved with the Chien Tan characters, a bride in a red qipao and her tuxedoed groom kiss while their photographer snaps away.

  “Is this a tourist attraction?” I ask. There must be fancier places in Taipei to take wedding photos.

  The van stops. Boy Wonder steps out after Sophie and extends his hand to me. “Li-Han says they met here four years ago.”

  Some traitorous part of me wants to take his hand, to see if it feels hot or cold, but the rest of me is irritated, with him and myself—it’s not like I can’t handle getting out of a van. I hop down on my own, ignoring it.

  “Cool. What are the chances?”

  “What are the chances?” Sophie flicks her black hair over her shoulder, laughing. “It’s Loveboat!”

  “Sorry? I don’t remember reading about a boat.”

  “It’s not a boat.” Sophie shoots Boy Wonder a meaningful glance, but he’s already leading us to the van’s back. “That’s the nickname. Like the old TV show. Add it to the tell-you-later list. Rick, let’s hit the markets first.”

  “You go ahead,” he says. “I need to find a pay phone. I promised Jenna I’d call as soon as I landed and I’m way late now.”

  “Jenna.” Sophie huffs. “You should date Ever,” she adds, to my utter horror. “Look, she’s perfect for you—you play football, she dances.”