by Grace Lin
So Ki-Ki, Mom, and I shoved through the crowds again (it was a little easier this time without all our luggage) to the bathroom. It smelled bad.
“Here,” Mom said, and she opened her purse and took out a blue change purse with gold embroidery. She handed it to me, brought me close, and whispered, “These are tissues. They don’t have toilet paper in public bathrooms. Use this. Don’t throw it down the toilet. There should be a garbage can in the corner, throw it there.”
I nodded as Ki-Ki and Mom vanished into a stall. I went into the stall next to them but stopped. There was no toilet in there! There was a porcelain-covered hole in the floor. That was strange. It was kind of like a urinal but in the ground. I didn’t look that closely. Instead I went to the next stall and then the next. Same thing! Were we in the boys’ bathroom? Or maybe someone had stolen the real toilets? And they couldn’t afford to put a whole toilet in, so they just put in those? That didn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t they just have fewer stalls and put a whole toilet in each one?
By then, Ki-Ki had finished and I still hadn’t found a toilet. As Mom and Ki-Ki left the stall, I saw there was a toilet in there, so I used that. That was the only toilet in the whole bathroom!
“Are we in the boys’ bathroom?” I whispered to Mom as I washed my hands.
“What? No,” Mom said. “Why?”
I nodded over at the stalls, and Mom laughed. “Those are a different kind of toilet. You’re supposed to just squat over them.”
It took me a little while to picture it, but once I did, I said, “Ew!”
Mom laughed again as I shook the water from my hands. “Those kinds of toilets were here before the ones you’re used to. And most people like those better. See how there is only one Western toilet in the whole bathroom?”
“Why?” Ki-Ki asked.
“Well, people think they are cleaner,” Mom said, motioning to a sign on the wall that I had missed before. It showed how to use (and not use) the bathroom.
“They’re not cleaner,” I said. “Those toilets are in the ground!”
“They’re cleaner for people using them,” Mom said. She was laughing as she pushed us out the door. “Think about it. With these toilets, you don’t have to worry about other people’s butts.”
We laughed, too, mainly because Mom said the word butt. And it felt better to think about that and laugh than to think about what she was saying. All this toilet talk was making me feel gross, and I was glad to leave it back with the bathroom.
Chapter 17
ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER WE GOT BACK FROM THE bathroom, there was a thundering roar and the train came rushing in. As it screeched to a stop in front of us, the crowds buzzed and swarmed. Then the train doors slid open, and there was a great shove as people rushed through the doors like grains of salt through a funnel. But as soon as we sat down and the train left the station, all was still. Not that the train wasn’t moving—it was going fast. I watched out the window as the buildings passed faster and faster. But inside the train, everyone seemed like silent, sitting statues.
Dad fell asleep almost immediately. I guess he still had jet lag. Every once in a while, he would snore and we would all laugh.
“How do you say ‘I can’t speak Chinese’ in Chinese?” Lissy asked Mom.
“Wo bu hui shuo Hanyu,” Mom said.
“Woo boo huwaay…” We all tried to repeat it, and the words tangled into a jumble. Ki-Ki and I giggled. Lissy shook her head.
“Too hard,” she said. “I think one word at a time is better. What’s the word for bathroom?”
“Xishoujian,” Mom said. “But in Taiwanese, it’s ben-so.”
“Wait,” I said. “There’s a big difference? Chinese, Taiwanese—it seems the same to me!”
“You know,” Lissy said, “Taiwanese is like slang.”
“Not exactly,” Mom said. “I guess Taiwanese is considered a dialect and Chinese the official language.”
“What’s a dialect?” Ki-Ki asked. This time, I was glad Ki-Ki was asking questions because I didn’t know what a dialect was, either.
“Hmm…” Mom thought hard before she spoke. “If every state in the United States had its own language in addition to English, that language would be a dialect. In China, some areas have their own languages—their own dialects—but Mandarin Chinese is the official language everyone knows. When the Chinese took over Taiwan, they made Chinese the official language. But people still speak Taiwanese at home.”
That was really confusing.
“So do people speak Chinese or Taiwanese here?” I asked.
“Well, Chinese is what people speak at work or at formal events,” Mom said. “Chinese is more universal—the language that more of the world knows. But Taiwanese is what most people here speak at home with their friends or family. So we use both.”
That meant all this time in Taiwan, people could’ve been speaking Chinese or Taiwanese to me and I would never have known. I sighed. It seemed hard to me, but Lissy wasn’t discouraged.
“You’d better teach us Chinese, then,” she said. “Then we can use it outside of Taiwan, too.”
“Okay,” Mom said. “In Chinese, the word for bathroom is xishoujian.”
“Xishoujian,” we all said together.
“What’s the word for please?” Lissy asked.
“Qing,” Mom said.
“How about sorry?”
“Duibuqi.”
“American?”
“Meiguoren.”
A woman with a cart of snacks came by, and I was glad. My stomach had been rumbling the whole time. Mom bought each of us some candy and a box of strawberry Pocky—which were kind of these long pretzels dipped in a strawberry coating. But it was sweet, not salty.
Mom wanted to teach us more Chinese words, but now we were more interested in our Pocky. I ate each pretzel one by one, scraping the pink strawberry layer with my teeth before crunching it, looking out the window the whole time.
After I finished my box of Pocky, I opened the bag of apple candy. It was good, but I was still hungry even after I ate the whole pack. I played with the wrapper, crinkling the Chinese words as I rolled it around in my hands. I wondered if the label just said apple candy or if the candy had a special name that meant something, like how Pacy meant “precious thought.”
Thinking about my name reminded me of the name chops we were going to get carved. I still didn’t feel much like a precious thought, so I wasn’t sure if I wanted my name on it. I liked how some of Dad’s friends had different things on their name chops. I didn’t want “never too tired for knowledge,” but “thoughts as evergreen as a pine tree” sounded kind of pretty. Like a piece of a poem. But the only poem I knew was the one that was on Valentine’s Day cards: “Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you.”
And I wasn’t going to put that on my name chop!
Outside the window, barrels burning bright flames for Ghost Month blurred by, and I thought about the ghosts visiting the living world. Maybe the ghosts felt the same way I did in visiting Taiwan. Here, everyone had conversations that flew through me, like I was steam from freshly cooked rice. Sometimes I felt as if no one even saw me, and that made me hollow and empty.
But maybe I just needed something to eat.
Chapter 18
WHEN WE GOT TO THE STATION, BIG UNCLE WASN’T there. Instead, beaming at us was Cousin Clifford!
“Surprise!” he said as he came up to us. “Are you happy to see me?”
We were. Ki-Ki and I ran over and jumped up and down, and Mom and Dad gave him a big hug. Even Lissy smiled. The last time we saw Clifford was when he got married in Boston, Massachusetts. Ki-Ki had been a flower girl, and I had jumped on his bed for good luck. He looked fatter and softer, but his grin was exactly the same. Seeing him made all my grumpiness from being hungry fall away like rain being shaken from a wet umbrella.
“We heard you were in Taiwan!” Mom said, even though she hadn’t told us that. “Where’s Lian?”
Lian was Clifford’s wife.
“She’s at work,” he said, grabbing one of the suitcases. “Our company is probably going to keep us here for another year. Then we’ll go back to the States.”
“How long have you been here?” Dad asked.
“Since May,” Clifford said. He put the suitcase down for a moment and started counting on his fingers. “So before this, I lived in Taiwan for two years. Now it’s a total of two years and three months that I’ve lived here. But Lian says I still speak Taiwanese like a seven-year-old.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Ki-Ki asked, offended.
We followed Clifford out of the train station, and he spoke to us fast without a break. He said he was excited to speak in English to “native speakers” again. I kind of knew how he felt. Except for when I spoke with Lissy or Ki-Ki, speaking English here in Taiwan felt like work and made me feel impatient sometimes. In class, whenever the teacher spoke, it always took me a couple of seconds to understand what he was saying, as if I had to wait for an echo. Here, speaking English to almost everyone—Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Bea, Uncle Flower, even Mom and Dad—was slower and clumsy.
“Sorry, you guys will have to take a taxi. Hope you don’t mind,” Clifford said. “I came on this.”
“This” was a silver-gray motor scooter. It was a mix of a motorcycle and a bicycle—there was an engine and everything, but parts were covered by plastic, and there was a basket in the back. I liked it!
“Can I ride on it?” Lissy asked.
“Me, too! Me, too!” Ki-Ki and I echoed excitedly.
Mom shook her head at us. “I don’t think it’s safe for you,” she said.
“It probably isn’t.” Clifford laughed, took a helmet out from the little carrier in the back, and began to strap it on his head. “People say they can tell that I’m from America because I use this helmet. Most people don’t wear one. But I think that’s crazy! The joke here is that traffic lights are not rules, just suggestions.”
We saw what he meant as the taxi drove us to Big Uncle’s place. It stopped and jerked and swayed, leaving angry honks behind us. Everything seemed confused, and the streets were small. One old lady was bicycling with boxes piled so high behind her that she looked like a moving mountain that took up a lot of room on the street. The taxi just squeezed past her, and as I worried that we might hit her, I saw a turtle’s head stick out of one of the boxes. Most people were on motor scooters like Clifford’s that swerved and sped around us like miniature rockets. There were a lot of motor scooters that had two, even three, kids clinging on to the driver.
Now I was kind of glad Mom hadn’t let me ride on the motor scooter. In New York City and in Taipei, traffic had been really busy, but here in Taichung, it was a busy, fast-moving mess. In school, one of my vocabulary words was chaos, and for the first time, I felt as if I understood what that word meant. Even in the taxi, I didn’t feel that safe.
“It’s different here,” I said. “I mean, different from Grandma’s place.”
“Yes, it’ll be more…” Dad paused and then said, “I’m not sure how to say it in English. It will be more real Taiwan.”
Real Taiwan? Weren’t we already in real Taiwan? It was strange to hear Dad say that. How could it be more real? Was it like those dumplings that could tell if you were a real Chinese person? Thinking about dumplings made me hungry. I didn’t know if we were in real Taiwan, but I did know I was really hungry!
“There’ll still be dumplings here, though, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” Dad said in a voice that pretended to be annoyed, but I knew he was just joking. “There will still be dumplings! Don’t worry! There will never not be dumplings anywhere in Taiwan.”
I grinned.
Chapter 19
BIG UNCLE WASN’T BIG. HE WASN’T SHORT OR SMALL, but because everyone called him Big Uncle, I thought he was going to be really tall and strong. Instead, he was just a little taller and wider than Dad and had a red face with drooping, tired-looking eyes. But he did have a big smile, which welcomed us as we got out of the taxi.
He, Aunt Ami, and Clifford had been waiting for us, and almost before we were all out of the taxi, Clifford had unloaded our luggage. He took it inside up to Big Uncle’s apartment and came back out.
“What do you want for dinner?” Clifford asked as he led us down the street.
“Pacy wants dumplings!” Lissy and Ki-Ki said together. I was a little embarrassed, but everyone laughed.
“I know a good place close by that does beef noodles,” Clifford said. “It probably has dumplings, too.”
We followed Clifford across the street. Crossing the street was hard. I realized that if traffic lights were just suggestions for cars, then they were also just suggestions for people walking in the streets, too. I squinted my eyes shut and walked close to Clifford as cars honked and motor scooters swerved around us, but he and Big Uncle just walked without concern. They must’ve been used to all the confusion.
Clifford led us through a door to a small restaurant. The place was very plain with old but clean white tiles on the floor and five rough wooden rectangular tables with benches on either side. In the back was a small kitchen with a man standing over a huge steaming pot, like in the pictures of witches stirring their brew.
“Ni hao, ni hao,” Clifford said to the man, who stuck his head out of the kitchen. Except for ni hao, I didn’t understand the words Clifford said or what the man said back. But Mom and Dad looked pleased and ordered food with big smiles.
“What did he say?” I asked as we all sat down at one of the tables.
“They make niu rou mien here,” Dad said, “special beef noodles—they are thicker than normal noodles and hand-pulled. They’re very good! I haven’t had real ones in a long time.”
“What do you mean, ‘real ones’?” I asked.
“The real good noodles are the ones that people make by hand. Come over here, and maybe you can see him make some,” Dad said, motioning me over to his side of the table. Lissy, Ki-Ki, and I crowded beside him and stared.
The man was quickly rolling a big mound of dough. When it looked like a perfectly round white log, he took it and stretched it wide, as far as his arms could reach. Then, so fast that we could barely see what he was doing, he began to wave his arms back and forth, twisting and slapping the dough onto the counter in front of him. He seemed to whirl and whip the dough around like he was casting some sort of spell or enchantment. And maybe he was, because Lissy, Ki-Ki, and I didn’t even notice that we’d walked closer to get a better look.
And it was magic, or close enough. Because, suddenly, in his hands were hundreds and hundreds of noodles. He had somehow stretched and pulled that roll of dough into long, perfect noodles—each one looking exactly the same. We were amazed.
He didn’t think he had done anything that wonderful, though. He calmly took a pair of big scissors and cut the noodles into the waiting, steaming pot. As he stirred, he smiled at us, and we felt a little silly for staring at him with our mouths open. We went back to the table.
“He made noodles with his hands!” Ki-Ki said.
“Yes, I told you,” Dad said. “Hand-pulled noodles. They’re the best.”
I wasn’t sure if they were the best, but they looked pretty good. The bowls had big chunks of beef sticking up like mountains in a sea of savory brown soup filled with pale yellow noodles. The steam wafted, and my mouth watered as a bowl was put in front of everyone. Everyone except me, that is.
“Hey, where’s mine?” I asked.
“Yours is coming,” Mom said. “Have some of mine while you are waiting.”
The hand-pulled noodles were good. Very good. Spicy and rich, the soup began to melt away the hungry ache in my stomach. But I wanted my own bowl. Where was mine?
“Here you go!” Clifford said as a different bowl was put in front of me. “We got this special for you.”
I looked into the bowl. “Dumplings!” I said. “Wonton soup!”
“No
t exactly,” Clifford said. “You know, in America, what they call wontons is from a word in Cantonese, the dialect in Southern China.”
“Really?” I said, but I wasn’t that interested in what Clifford was saying. I was too busy eating.
“And if you translate the Cantonese word wantan, which wonton comes from,” Clifford said, “it means ‘swallowing clouds.’ So you can consider eating a wonton like swallowing a cloud.”
“Why?” Ki-Ki asked.
“Maybe because the wonton feels smooth when you swallow it,” Clifford said. “Or maybe because of the shape—like clouds, no two wontons are exactly the same. Anyway, these dumplings aren’t wontons. You can tell because they are in the shape of ears.”
“Ears!” I said. I stopped eating for a moment. “What?”
STORY OF DUMPLING SOUP
Once there was a famous doctor, Zhang Zhongjing, who lived by the river in a cold part of China. He treated and cured many things, but in the winter, the things he treated the most were people’s ears! That sounds strange, I know, but where he lived in China, the winters were particularly cold. The icy wind whipped and burned any exposed skin.
It was so cold that when a villager joked that his breath froze into pieces of ice in the air, all believed him because even if the cold did not freeze one’s breath, it really did freeze people’s ears. The doctor was kept busy during the winters treating frostbitten ears. He knew that people with frostbite needed warmth to heal, so he began to make a remedy that would warm people’s insides as well as their outsides. He cooked meat with warming herbs and finely chopped it. Then he wrapped it in thinly rolled dough and boiled the pieces in soup with more herbs. When the mixture was finished, he called it “soup that takes away the cold,” or “qu han jiao er tang.” He then served it to his frostbitten patients, who not only healed quickly, but enjoyed the soup so much that they continued to eat it.