☻ ABOUT . ISSUES . EVENTS ☻
𝙺𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚊 𝙻𝚘 𝙸𝚗𝚗𝚎𝚜
𝚃𝚊𝚖𝚖𝚢
I had never met Tammy. I found her on Facebook. I showed her profile picture to my mom, who squinted at my phone screen and went, “Yeah, wow, I think that’s her? I haven’t seen her since she was a baby.” And then after, once we friended each other, she added me on Line and we started texting. At first, it was just a lot of logistical stuff. When was the best time for me to visit Taipei? What SIM card should I get? What sort of clothes should I pack?
Tammy’s mom was my mom’s cousin. So, that made her my second cousin, I think. I’d never met any of my family in Taiwan. My grandparents left before martial law was lifted. All my relatives in Taiwan were distant. As a child, I often wondered what they would be like. I could never create a strong mental image of them. Their faces were always fuzzy, their voices equally distant and opaque.
I was going to stay with Joy, my friend who was working in Taipei as a teacher. Joy’s entire family still lived in Taiwan. Staying with Joy was way less of a gamble than staying with Tammy. Besides, I’d asked Tammy once if I could stay with her and she didn’t reply to my message, instead replying three days later with an Epoch Times article about how in Canada, Russian state-sponsored pedophiles were running DEI child trafficking rings. I asked Joy about it and she just replied, “People in Taiwan can be really conservative. I try to steer away from political conversations unless it’s something we can all agree on, like how invasion would suck.” Joy always knew so much more than me.
Eventually, I started to get a sense of what Tammy was like as a person, and not just an automated response bot.
Tammy loved face filters and baseball. She was a fan of the Rakuten Monkeys and was always posting badly edited photos of herself and various players of the game. Her feed was all Rakuten Monkey updates and bowling. She loved bowling and was part of some rec league, so we were going to go together.
One Halloween, she posted a photo of herself dressed up as a skeleton at the bowling alley.
great costume! I commented.
She replied with:
She was some sort of healthcare administrator. She seemed to have a boyfriend, or at least a male compatriot in all of her photos, but she always blocked his face with emojis. I figured it was some sort of cultural thing. I noticed that she would often block other people's faces with emojis too. I guessed that she was vain. I felt sort of bad scrolling through her Facebook account and making all these assumptions. Maybe I was being ignorant. Maybe Taiwanese people were just on another level of posting that I didn’t understand.
When I landed, Joy picked me up from the airport and took me straight to her apartment. She was living near NTU. I dropped my stuff off and we went to the food stall on her corner. My mouth still tasted like airplane. Joy ordered us two huge bowls of beef noodle soup. They arrived immediately, steam rising from the broth.
I looked around the stall. There was a guy with a motorcycle helmet under his arm waiting for his meal. A bunch of old men were drinking beers and smoking. A dog with yellow fur and pointy ears was curled up at their feet, sleeping. The TV was playing news, something about the Chinese spy balloon.
I texted Tammy.
[19:37] adele: hey tammy, landed today! I am staying near Linguang MRT station. let me know if you would like to have dinner tomorrow?
I asked Joy about what her life in Taipei was like. Joy poked around at her noodles. She seemed to roll the weight of her thoughts around in her head before she spoke.
“It’s worth it. I get to spend so much time with my mom and aunties. I missed speaking and thinking in Mandarin all the time, I missed Asian public parks. I missed the alleys here, I was missing it all so much I didn’t even realize it.”
It had been four years since Joy last visited.
“I always feel like such an a-tok-á when I’m here,” she said. “Like, a big nose foreigner. Everything I do and everything I wear and how I talk just screams that I was raised in the West.”
I swallowed my noodles. “Yeah, I get what you mean.”
“Yeah. I feel like I overcompensate. Anyway, Taiwan is so weird. I love it, but so weird. So random. Did you know one of the only ingredients in this dish that is actually produced in Taiwan is the greens?” Joy said.
“Oh?”
“Everything else that’s necessary, the beef, the flour for the noodles, the tomatoes in the broth, are imported, but it’s the national dish. Everything else is shipped in from Mainland or Australia.”
“That’s so interesting,” I said, poking at the bits of food left at the bottom of my bowl.
Joy shrugged. “Not really. You’d be shocked at how much is made in Canada that’s also all imported. Like, the best maple syrup isn’t even Canadian. It’s from Vermont.”
I chewed on the last piece of meat in my soup.
The next morning, I woke up and Joy was already at work. I checked my phone. Tammy hadn’t replied. I didn’t think anything of it, she could be slow to respond. I clicked through them aimlessly on a park bench. A group of turtles was sunbathing in the pond in front of me, and a ten-year-old boy was taking photos of them with an iPad, his mother standing watch a couple of feet behind, taking pictures of her son and the turtles together.
I looked around: it wasn’t quite what I imagined, but it was still beautiful. It wasn’t as grand or as different as I thought it would be. Whenever my mom or grandparents talked about Taipei, it was always stuck in the past. It was something to be forgotten or to be missed. But being here, Taipei was very much in the present. It hummed. It was so full of life.
I figured I could fill my day until Joy got home. I texted a couple of other people I knew from university who were here on exchange or visiting family. I texted them asking to grab boba, or to go do something, I was game for anything, really.
I watched my notifications pile up at the top of my phone screen. hey sorry im at my grandmas. im busy with class! hang tmrw tho? sorry sorry sorry sorry
Two days later, Tammy texted me back the next morning. She sent me a link to the lantern fest activities across Taipei.
[17:59] adele: ok, so do u want to go to one of these together tomorrow?
[02:34] Tammy:
I took that as a yes.
[11:00] adele: great! let’s say 7 p.m. tonight? we can bowl after?
I got up and stretched. I made a mental note that I could stretch with the elders down at the public park if I wanted to. Listen to people practice their instruments by the fountain. Things of that sort. I got myself breakfast and journalled. I started to feel genuine anxiety in my stomach. I was going to meet Tammy.
I texted my mom and Joy that it was happening. My mom thumbs up reacted my message.
[11:15] JOY美玲CHIU: OMG HUGE!!
[11:16] JOY美玲CHIU: im working until 8 so ill c u after! soooo excited to debrief hehehe
I went to a depressing and small museum on the top floor of an office building about comfort women. I walked around colonial Japanese buildings that were now deemed heritage sights and looked at mountains of dried goods. I passed families and school groups. I felt strange and gangly and alone. Finally, evening came around, and I went to meet up with Tammy at a temple where lantern festival activities were happening.
I was a bit early. The square was decorated with huge dragons and rabbits made out of string lights. Everything seemed designed for Instagram. There was a heart shaped archway where people were taking photos.
I checked my phone. It was 7:05. I shot Tammy a message.
[19:05] adele: hey! im at the fountains near the MRT entrance.
I waited longer. I watched more people take photos in front of the statues. I looked at the light sculptures perched above the centuries-old Buddhist temple and wondered if this is what the monks had in mind when they built in the temple, and then realized that monks probably didn’t build the temple, some landlord or warlord probably did, and even if they did, there were monks worshiping there now and cleaning it everyday and they seemed chill with the lights. At 7:30 I texted Tammy, and then at 7:45 I texted her again. I looked at the tiny dot by her name that glowed green when she was online. It was grey. She hadn’t been active in hours.
I opened and closed and re-opened Instagram. I deleted Instagram. I felt myself going crazy by looking at my phone.
[20:30] adele: r u coming?
[20:35] adele: ?
I started wondering if Tammy was dead or something. I actually didn’t know who else I could contact. When I found Tammy, I’d gone through her friends to see if there were any other names that seemed familiar. I sent a couple profiles to my mom if she recognized them. She said she did, but they never responded to my requests.
Suddenly, I got a message from Tammy. My heart skipped and I opened it. It was a link. I clicked on it.
It took me to a site that was either a porn site or a gambling website. Either way, there were a lot of cartoon naked women and animations of slot machines. I quickly closed it and shut my phone off.
I mentally went through the archive of my messages with Tammy. Had she been weird before this? I mean, she was, but had there been anything this explicitly strange? My face felt flush with embarrassment. I pressed my hands to my cheeks and they were red hot.
I walked out of the square and through a small night market. I felt nauseous. I’d been starving before but now nothing looked appetizing. I tried not to think about the link Tammy sent and what that could’ve possibly meant. I felt like the stupidest person to ever be alive.
Joy found me in the park. I was sitting on a bench facing a pond.
“I feel so dumb. No one’s ever been dumber than me.” I was staring at the ground.
“Your mom said Tammy was your cousin, right?”
“She said she thought she was my cousin.”
The park was dark. A couple people were jogging or walking their dogs. I was crying uncontrollably. My tears were big and awful and fat, tears like I was a toddler, tears like I was at daycare and I was separated from my mother for the first time.
“Here, take this. I’m sorry your cousin was a catfish or a sex bot.” Joy placed a small plastic container beside me. It was one of the pink-chiffon cakes from 7/11, the ones filled with strawberry jam that looked almost too perfect to eat.
“You know, I said it before, but I’m really glad you’re finally here.”
Sometimes people say things to you like you’re in a movie or a tv show and it’s terrible and cheesy but you actually really need to hear it.
Afterwards, I stood on Joy’s balcony and ate the slice of cake. It tasted like processed sugar. Like Joy. I texted my mom that I didn’t think Tammy was real, and that I missed her. I cried more, my sobs drowned out by the endless clamor of motorcycles. At all hours of the day, the balcony was the exact same level of noise: loud. And even now it was bright. The clusters of mid-rise apartments gave way to the hollow skyscrapers in the distance, leaking light pollution into the night sky. I looked out at the motorcyclists, their headlights crawling like a river of red and white through the narrow street. They were riding into a sea of electricity.
I imagined that some of them had just clocked off work. They were weary-eyed but full of hunger and warmth. I imagined that some were just starting to leave on clandestine journeys, en route to see a lover somewhere down the east coast. I imagined that somehow they were not lonely like I pwas, even though they probably were. But for all of them, I imagined that they had families. I imagined them going home to families that were real and belonged to them. And if I could talk to them I would tell them never to leave each other. Never to move—not to another city, not to another country, let alone, not across an ocean. Not even if the money dried up, the earth salted, and the wells filled with concrete. Then, this way, they would have nothing to miss.
On my last day, Joy took me on a hike. She had a day off of work. I had spent the past month doing other things besides seeing a non-existent family. I went to museums. I saw the ocean. I watched cranes fly over valleys. I had a lot of soy milk for breakfast. I befriended people from Germany, from San Francisco. I danced to Imogen Heap in a club full of smoke. I cried everywhere: in the back of a cab, on the Taipei 101 observation deck, at a cafe with Joy in front of a bunch of influencers, who were taking photos with potted plants. I never saw Tammy and I never went bowling.
We took the bus to Yangmingshan. At the stop, I noticed that I had two new texts from Tammy. I opened it.
[11:36] Tammy:
[11:36] Tammy: https://bit.ly.tw/PayPal45%482
[11:40] adele: bye tammy <3
I closed my phone. We got off the bus and started hiking. It was overcast at first, but once we reached the summit of Qixing, the clouds parted to reveal the sweeping panorama below: the smoggy city, the rolling mountains, the vast Pacific.
I listened to Joy talk about her new Mandarin class, how it was once funded by the CIA but not anymore. She talked about how bad the minimum wage was and how the country was still beholden to foreign development. She talked about how her Ah-ma had three names: one in Japanese, one in Taiwanese, one in English. All these names for different purposes. All these names created three people that was just one person.
I looked towards Keelung harbour, searching for those freighters, those big metal ships that brought in produce and electronics and Walt Disney.
There they were. From my vantage, they looked like toy ships, tiny vessels nestled along the coast, bright spots against the blue ocean. If someone hadn’t pointed them out, you probably wouldn’t notice them.
I made a note that, before I left, I should get a souvenir for my mom.
Katia Lo Innes is a writer and journalist based in Montréal. Her work has appeared in The Breach, In The Mood, Maisonneuve, THIS, and others.