Goodbye (Taipei, Taiwan)

After getting back from Manila, I spent a few days relishing my empty apartment. My roommate was visiting home in Japan. I ate takeout soup dumplings and Vietnamese food, studied for the GRE, and watched TV. A friend was in a television drama. Every night he’d text me: ‘turn to channel 8, and you can see me!’ I’d start to drift off watching his TV show, not understanding the Taiwanese and too tired to read the quickly changing Chinese subtitles.

Then my first goodbye of the last week struck. I went to visit my old Fulbright host family in Luodong, the town next over to where I lived last year in Yilan. Even though the bus ride is only an hour from where I lived in Taipei, I almost never went back to visit. I still saw my host sister regularly in Taipei, even after she graduated from NTU and started working, and every once and a while had dinner with the rest of her family. Not having any family of my own around, it was nice to be invited to the important events of someone’s else family – Chinese New Year, college graduation, and family dinners – even if my mind sometimes drifted absently as everyone spoke in Mandarin too rapid for me to keep up with (or, with the older folks, Taiwanese).

We walked around a nearby park and sat next to the lake, watching the trains go by, and then got dinner at a Western-style restaurant with the rest of the family. I learned about an aunt who was going to quit her job and travel the world until she found love as I ate my pumpkin gnocchi and avoided the squid-ink bread. For dessert we had a red bean cake to celebrate three upcoming birthdays: mine (9/1, 24 years), my host brother’s (9/3, 12 years), and my host sister’s (9/6, 22 years). It’s an odd coincidence of numbers.

Then my host mom drove me over to the bus station. My young host brother was forced to grudgingly say goodbye in English (that’s what happens when your mother is an English teacher), while I did the same in Chinese. I told them how thankful I was to have gotten the chance to get to know them all, and my host sister told me to stop trying to make them cry. I’d see her later in Taipei anyway. I got on the bus. Goodbye Luodong!

After that, I was seized with the intense need to experience everything ‘unique’ to Taiwan before leaving, everything that I would miss and miss out on after leaving. It was overwhelming and I ended up just hanging out in cafes studying. I had another goodbye dinner, although this one seemed less sad, more our-paths-will-cross-again and we’ll be just fine in the meantime.

  I went through a packing frenzy, as if I could just rush through this sad end to things and move on to the next part of my life. I had another goodbye, with my television drama friend. This one was tough. I spent half a day at home ignoring the half-packed suitcases and working my way through the giant box of moon cakes he’d given me. I’m not much one for wallowing though. I got off the couch, finished packing and sold or shipped the rest of my belongings. Studied for the GRE more. Researched my prospective grad schools. My roommate came back from Japan, which brought some life back into the apartment.

I had my fourth goodbye of the week with two friends from Yilan. I slurped down a gigantic bowl of beef noodle soup with them, before heading over to Da’an park. As we walked there, we stopped at a bakery. My friend told me to distract our other friend while she bought him a cake for his birthday, which had been a few days before. When we got to the park she unveiled two cakes – she had not only enlisted my help, but also told him to distract me so she could buy a cake for my birthday as well. We laughed and ate our cakes.

The next day, I finalized everything. It was Saturday. I was leaving Sunday afternoon. My bags were packed, my room bare. My roommate and I went to my favorite café and that was my goodbye to the XX and comfy chairs with cappuccinos, scones, and pumpkin soup.

That night, my roommate and host sister went to a night market for pan fried buns, Taiwanese sausage, stinky tofu, oyster omelets, and chocolate, matcha and red bean xue hua bing (snow ice).

Afterwards, we went to a bookstore so I could buy a Chinese food cookbook in Chinese as a method of combating the language loss and hunger pangs that will inevitably occur when I return to the states. We had some trendy green tea drinks with a salty, foamy top that my roommate and I both gagged on (to my host sister’s amusement). We finished our goodbye and went home.

On Sunday, my last day, I ended up making my final goodbye to my television drama friend. I had one of those wonderfully terrible hugs where you hold the other person so tight it feels impossible to ever let them go, but then you do, and instead it feels impossible to ever touch them again, and it’s over, they leave, and it’s time for you to leave too.

So I did.

I don't really cry easily but sometimes it seems like my tears are saving themselves specifically to embarrass me in the most public places possible: the Beijing International Airport, the Boston Logan airport, Taipei’s Bureau of Consular Affairs - and now the Taipei Songshan airport. At least I’m not the only one – later on, boarding my connecting flight in Shanghai, I saw a young woman crying out her goodbyes into a cell phone as she walked up to the plane.

 

As the plane rolled out onto the runway, I could see Taipei 101 in the distance, until we started moving faster, going farther and farther, and rising up into the air, and Taipei 101 was gone. I was still pretty teary at this point but then the plane rose higher over the clouds and the view was so beautiful that it completely distracted me. I spent the whole flight to Shanghai watching the sun go down.

I had an overnight layover and I was leaving from a different airport, on the other side of Shanghai. The logistics of handling this kept me feeling busy instead of melancholy, especially when I was stopped at customs for half an hour. My passport was taken away with little explanation, but it wasn't the first time I’ve been detained in Mainland China with my passport taken away and no explanation offered, so I wasn’t too worried. After asking what was going on – “don’t worry, we just need to process your passport correctly, sit tight” – the customs officials realized I could speak Chinese and we chatted a bit. At first, they were impressed with my Chinese, but there was a phrase I didn’t understand and so they asked where I studied – “Taiwan,” I said. They laughed a little and said I couldn’t study proper Chinese there. I didn’t really want to argue with the custom officials in charge of my entry, so I just returned to my seat and passed the time reviewing GRE vocab.

I ate the best wonton soup of my life that night, searched fruitlessly for a source of internet, and fell asleep watching Audrey Hepburn fall for Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina. I woke up the next day, refreshed and 24 years old, ready to head west and chase another sunset.