Loveboat, Taipei

by Abigail Hing Wen

  “I really do like them. Your songs have a way of sticking in my head.”

  “My parents played this one when I was growing up.”

  “I can’t imagine sharing music with my parents.”

  Her brow rises. “Why not?”

  “We just like different things.”

  “I miss my parents so much.” She says it truthfully and without embarrassment. I envy her.

  “They don’t live in Taipei?”

  “We live on the eastern shore, in a small village. Several hours away.”

  “Why did you take this job? Not to spend your summer chasing delinquents.”

  She laughs, a soft, soothing sound. “I wanted to meet kids from other countries, and help them learn about mine.” She smiles and touches her iPod. “Orchid Grass” has ended. “If I can make even one person love one song of mine, I will have succeeded. Also”—her voice grows wistful—“my family needs the money. I have two younger sisters. My mom just had a baby.”

  I imagine Pearl. Mei-Hwa is a big sister, like me. And wasn’t I just like her at the start of summer? Steady and responsible? Barely able to even imagine trouble, let along get myself into it?

  “Do you . . . want to talk?” she asks hesitantly.

  I meet her gaze. She bites her lip, as uncomfortable as I am. I’m glad we talked. Got to know each other a little bit more.

  But no matter how friendly or sensitive Mei-Hwa is, she’s still the Dragon’s eyes and ears.

  “Thanks, but I’m good,” I say. “Thanks for sharing your song.”

  And with that, I slip away.

  In my room, the closet stands open and emptied of clothes and hangers. My dresses lie in crumpled heaps, as though Sophie had kicked them around. My black chiffon skirt has soaked up a can of stale beer. Her dirty laundry still remains in her hamper, but she seems to have moved out. It’s a small reprieve.

  I mop and sort into the night, trying to put some order back into my universe. I find my lilac V-neck and jean cutoffs that I wore on the flight here, scrunched under my bed. I’ve come so far from that girl who showed up on Loveboat. I pad to my dresser, where I dig out the list of Wong Rules. Drinking, wasting money, boys, sex. I’ve devoted all my energies to doing what my parents don’t want, instead of what I want.

  And I’ve been impulsive, stupid. And selfish.

  “Wǒ zhǐ xūyào gēn tā shuōhuà.” It’s Xavier, outside in the hallway.

  Mei-Hwa answers in Mandarin. Her voice rises, then a knock sounds on my door.

  “Ever, it’s me,” Xavier says.

  I grip my shorts in my lap. My body still remembers. Everything. I can’t face him. Not now. Maybe not ever.

  “Please don’t push me away.”

  He’s afraid. His fear tugs a chord in my heart.

  But he’s the one who isn’t supposed to get hurt. The Player who deserves anything. Why must he be so vulnerable?

  Mei-Hwa is scolding him, back in full-fledged counselor mode. I picture her tiny, determined frame, yanking him down the hallway, proof that size has nothing to do with power, and I almost want to go out to spare her and him the awkwardness.

  “I’m sorry, I just can’t talk tonight,” I say finally, but they’re gone.

  I email Pearl to check she hasn’t been scorched by the conflagration back home, then pour my heart out to Megan in a three-page email.

  Finally, I delete the entire note and replace it:

  Miss you SO much. Hope you and Dan are having a blast.

  In the morning, I wake from the fading dream of a white feather tutu. I cling to its threads as they slip from me: Rick’s laugh, Xavier’s paint-smeared fingers. Why was I dreaming of them both? The light through the window is gray. No one’s awake yet, the silence unnatural.

  I study my list of Wong Rules. A new list runs through my head—instead of Straight As: work on projects I love. Instead of curfews and no drinking and dress like a nun: everything in moderation.

  But those rules are reactions. Which means that list still belongs to my parents.

  Not to me.

  I crumple the Wong Rules into a ball and toss it at the trash can. Score. Outside my window, down in the courtyard, Marc and his Angry Asian Men are wading calf-deep through flood waters. My eyes fall on Rick’s blue socks, folded together, on the edge of my desk. I pull their wooly softness over my hands and clap softly, feeling an odd, hollow sense of loss. Like I’ve misplaced something.

  Without Sophie’s mini-speakers playing music, the room feels stiflingly still. I adjust my radio alarm clock until I find a Taiwanese pop song with a toe-twitching backbeat. It’s followed by an American eighties song.

  Almost against my will, the music takes hold of my shoulders, then my hips, then my feet. Slowly, my stocking arms draw curves through the air, picking up speed as the music deepens. My fingers pulse against the stretchy knit, wrists flex parallel movements to the rhythm. I begin to dance. One song. Another, another, my feet beating out the rhythm on the floor. I whirl into the space between the dressers, my long-armed shadow stag leaps over the walls, until, deep in my body, I understand what I will never have words for.

  As the fifth song fades, I spin a slow circle. My blue hands sketch a cylinder around my body, slimming to the song’s last note. There’s a pulsing deep inside me as my blood storms the chambers of my heart. Maybe it took hitting bottom this weekend to give me the wake-up call I needed.

  I open my notebook, and write a new list. Neither in obedience to my parents, nor against them:

  1. Sort things out with Xavier

  2. Help him with reading

  3. Learn some Mandarin (would be nice to understand what my parents say in code)

  4. Choreograph an original dance for the talent show, even if I can’t be in it

  5. Dance my heart out until med school

  I stack Rick’s socks neatly and set them on the desk. Smooth out the tiny dancing figurines.

  After a moment, I put my pen to the page again:

  6. Wait for love next time

  I write a new title at the top:

  The Ever Wong Plan

  Opening my door takes four yanks that threaten to pop both arms from their sockets. Oh for heaven’s sake, Sophie’s voice echoes in my head, and I feel a pang.

  I head down the stairs to the landing, where the blue flyer still hangs by a piece of tape.

  Do you sing? Play an instrument? Juggle?

  Sign up for the Talent Show today!

  I tear it from the wall and find Debra and Laura in the second-floor lounge, sprawled on red yoga mats, working out to Taylor Swift. I roll the flyer into a tube, more nervous than if I were approaching a guy for a first date.

  “Hey, Ever.” Debra finishes a set of leg lifts, and unsticks her butterfly-printed shirt from her sternum.

  “What’s up?” Laura rolls her mat into a tube of her own.

  I show the flyer to my fellow clubbers. “I was wondering if you girls might be up for working with me on a dance routine.” The talent show needs to be Chien Tan–themed, but that’s not a limitation so much as a chance to take some risks. “I’ve got a dance based on something I put together for a friend and me back home. I can incorporate ribbons and fans from your electives. Music-wise, I’m thinking of a mix of American and Taiwanese songs.”

  “Cool,” Debra says.

  “Not too weird?”

  “No, I’m in,” Laura says. “I bet Lena would join us. She’s a pro.”

  “We can practice in the B Building,” Debra says.

  “I have a confession,” I say. “I’m technically not allowed in the talent show.”

  “The photos?” Debra scowls.

  “Yeah.” A dig in my stomach. “We can’t let the Dragon know I’m involved. I won’t be in the show. I’ll just teach you the dance. Besides, after my photos, it’s for the best that I’m not onstage.” With all those eyes on my body.

  “Bull,” Debra says, but I press on before I lose my nerve.


  “We can start tomorrow after electives.”

  “Tomorrow’s temple tour. Thursday’s Sun Yat-Sen Memorial,” Laura reminds me. “Friday’s the National Palace Museum.”

  So many obstacles already, with our schedule filling up as the weeks roll on. Funny how when you let yourself want, the fear of not getting it ratchets up.

  But inch by inch, I’m on my way with the Ever Wong Plan.

  “Saturday then,” I say.

  I owe Xavier an explanation. An apology and a talk. But I’m relieved not to spot him in the dining hall; he’s never been an early riser. I move through the buffet line and place a pork-stuffed bāozi onto my tray as Marc passes by the double doors. He’s dressed for running in track shorts and a sleeveless jersey.

  “Marc,” I call. Setting down my tray, I dart toward the door, only to slam into the Dragon. Her stout arms are filled with a stack of readers. Her heavy perfume wafts over me.

  “Ai-Mei.” Her measuring eyes sweep the length of my skirt and her lips tighten.

  But before she can pronounce some judgment, I dart past her.

  “Marc!”

  Halfway down the hallway, he turns. His hair, parted down the middle, falls in its usual chocolate milk streaks to his cheeks. His eyes light up and he swings a long, brown-paper-wrapped package from under his arm.

  “Hey, Ever. I was looking for you—”

  “Did Rick go to Hong Kong to meet Jenna?”

  Marc’s eyes shift as I catch up to him. “It was an emergency.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s—complicated.”

  “Is someone hurt? Jenna’s dad?”

  He thrusts the paper package into my hand. “He asked me to give you this.”

  “What is it?” I unwrap the paper to an elegant bo staff: lightweight rattan marked with tiger stripes, tapering at either end.

  “We were in the market waiting for Li-Han to drive him to the airport, and he bought it.”

  “What for?”

  “Stick fighting.”

  I flush. “Obviously.” I run my hand down its polished surface. It’s flawless—no splinters for me from this pole. I twirl it a full revolution. I would have admired its balance if I wasn’t so off-balance myself. Is he saying he remembers the almost-kiss? I love it too much already, and I can’t afford that.

  “Tell him thanks,” I say stiffly.

  “He said to tell you sorry and that he’d talk to you when he gets back in a few days.”

  “Sorry for what?” For the kiss? The whole messed-up weekend? Maybe he’s trying to make up for Aunty Claire hating me.

  Marc shrugs. “I figured you’d know.”

  I don’t. And I can’t read into his kindness, when most likely, that’s all this is.

  “I hope no one’s hurt,” I say. Tucking the staff under my arm, I start to head back to breakfast, then turn back.

  “Who started the fight?”

  “Rick.” Marc bites his lip. “But they’ve kind of been at it since the beginning.”

  “But . . . why? I haven’t—”

  “Sorry, Ever. Not sure how much he’d want me to say.” Marc balls up the paper, his expression pained. “He’ll be back soon. Talk to him then.”

  I avoid Xavier in Mandarin by switching seats to the front by Debra and Laura, dashing out as soon as we’re dismissed. The next days pass in a blur: homework in an empty classroom under Mei-Hwa’s supervision, who rewards my efforts by eliminating a demerit. I chat with her a bit more about music and her family, while all of Chien Tan launches sky lanterns from the balconies of the Grand Hotel. No sneaking out clubbing for me either—but I don’t care. “Maybe I got the whole clubbing thing out of my system,” I tell Megan, when I finally catch her from the pay phone downstairs. “Or maybe everything else that’s happened has overshadowed it.”

  “Or maybe you’re just finally doing more of what you want to do,” she says wisely.

  Now I tap a rhythm on my thigh under my desk, plotting out my new dance as the Dragon teaches us radicals, the components of characters: three tick marks for water, a five-pointed explosion for fire, a bleeding heart for heart. I recite lines of poetry and sing “Liǎng Zhī Lǎo Hǔ,” and listen to a talk by Mei-Hwa on the more than sixteen Aboriginal tribes who make up 2.3 percent—a bit over 500,000 people—of this island’s population, all the while feeling Xavier’s eyes on the back of my head.

  Rick’s been gone three days. I hate that I’m counting.

  At night in my room, I twirl his bo staff. A flagless staff has so much potential and I experiment with sweeps, lunges, jabs at invisible enemies. The staff hisses through the air and I remember slamming Rick’s knuckles. I hadn’t expected his absence to dominate my thoughts and even my dancing. Back at home, he was the hated Boy Wonder. And here . . . ?

  I don’t know what this means. Or if it means anything at all.

  Thursday, Laura and I climb the steps to the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial, a square building topped by a yellow, swallowtail roof. Inside, a two-story statue of a man who looks like my uncle Johnny, sits on a carved stone chair. He’s flanked by Taiwanese flags in red, white, and blue.

  “He was a doctor before becoming a revolutionary,” Laura says.

  “Way to overachieve.”

  “Right? It reminds me of the Lincoln Memorial.”

  “Me, too. Or is it the other way around? Maybe tourists from Taiwan look at Lincoln and think, cool, just like Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s, too bad they don’t have sentries standing by to show some respect.”

  Laura laughs.

  Friday afternoon, we board luxury buses for the National Palace Museum. Warm rain sheets down as we arrive at a stunning gate of five white arches topped by sea-green roofs. Laura and I open our umbrellas and fight the rain as we walk up a broad avenue of flagstones flanked by thick-leaved trees. The museum itself, a sprawling, beige palace, is nestled at the base of an enormous leafy mountain. Five matching sea-green-and-orange pagodas rise at its center, and on either side.

  Halfway there, we run into Sam and David getting down on hands and knees, black hair dripping with rain. Peter and Marc climb on top to form a human pyramid while a fifth guy snaps photos on his phone.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. I decide to pretend I don’t remember David had one of my nude pictures.

  “We’re taking back our stereotypes,” Marc says.

  I’m confused. “Is this for an elective?”

  “No, it’s our statement. To the world. The Gang of Four Manifesto.”

  I laugh. They’re an odd bunch: heavy-set Sam, wiry David with his goatee, soft-skinned Peter, and lanky Marc. “So what stereotype is this?”

  “Haven’t you noticed? The Asian dad in the movies snapping a million photos?”

  “I thought you were calling yourselves the Angry Asian Men?” Laura says.

  “Gang of Four’s better,” says the aspiring journalist. “They were the badass officials who led the Cultural Revolution and were charged with treason by the new government. Not that I’m on their side, but they have a great name.”

  Laura hands me her phone. “Take my photo with them, will you?”

  As I snap a shot, my purse is knocked from my shoulder. Sophie sweeps by in a flutter of red silk, arm in arm with Benji. Last I heard, she was dating Chris, full speed ahead to find her man. Benji throws a panicked, Bambi-eyed gaze over his shoulder.

  “She’s not just boy crazy,” Laura says. “She’s insane.”

  “It’s her family.” Why am I trying to explain? She wants a husband, not a hookup. Laura raises her brows like I’m speaking pig Latin. With many of the girls refusing to associate with Sophie, I’ve won the battle in a way. But instead of vindicated, I feel strangely responsible, as if her unhappiness now is my doing. What she did was wrong, but I’ve wronged her, too, and I can’t see how either of us will ever recover.

  Some guys are approaching from behind. “Taiwan wants freedom.” Spencer’s talking politics as usual. “The entire country ha
s a history of oppression—first by the Japanese occupation, then the KMT. And is the US coming to their aid if Beijing comes after them?”

  “If it works for them,” Xavier answers.

  “Hurry, Laura.” Panicked, I dart ahead before they can catch up to us. “I’m soaked. Let’s get inside.”

  A red-carpeted staircase leads to galleries of incredible things: carved ivory globes nested one inside another; nuts and olive stones carved into animals, boats, demon masks. A jade statue of a boy and bear embracing makes me think of Rick. Maybe Jenna got wind of our fake relationship and is breaking up with him? Maybe her dad’s involved. Or maybe I want something to be wrong, when Rick’s actually strolling hand in hand with Jenna through the night markets of Hong Kong, Ever Wong a distant memory.

  I try to immerse myself in these treasures of China, liberated/stolen by the KMT, depending on which side of history you sit. I skirt Xavier’s group by a Mongolian yurt and line up with Laura and a few girls to view a famous Chinese cabbage chiseled from a single cut of white-and-green jade. We get a lesson on how to distinguish jade from rocks by shining a light through it.

  At lunch, I find the source of things I’d chalked up to quirks of my parents: freshly pulped watermelon juice, passion fruit halves served with tiny plastic spoons. I even run across Mom’s favorite—a purple dragon fruit dripping with dark juices, instead of the white, desiccated ones imported by the Cleveland Chinese grocery. The heft of it in my hand makes me uneasy and I set it back on its tray and move on.

  After lunch, I find myself wandering alone into a large salon where a crowd fights its way toward a glass case. Sweat-laced bodies pile up behind me, and I’m inched forward like toothpaste in a tube, until I’m squeezed out against the case. Fighting for breath, I brace a hand on the glass and peer at a cinnamon-brown slice of pork belly on a gold platter. Light glistens off a layer of fat and striations of fleshy meat. It looks good enough to sink a pair of chopsticks into and devour—and wonders of wonders, it’s made of jasper.

  “That stone is the one thing you absolutely had to see in Taipei,” a voice teases behind me. “And now you have.”