Oh yeah. Taiwan.

Don’t know why, but I suddenly remembered I never wrote about my trip to Taiwan to visit Mercedes & Andy. I’d say the trip had more personal significance than anything else. It was really just to see Mercedes & Andy, with the added bonus that Mercedes & I were going to go through our high school reunion page because ffs, it has been 20 years since we graduated.

First impressions, I have to say I really liked the airport. Second, it was hot & humid, & Mercedes & Andy assured me that the temperature had dropped since the week before. They have a pretty nice place, though I’ll admit I was surprised it was so small because that’s not usually Mercedes’ MO when it comes to traveling. It was nice, & surprisingly educational because I learned that their washer was also a dryer, but the dryer has no settings, except what should be called scorched, as the dryer has burned holes into their sheets. Hanging them to dry as their neighbors do isn’t an option, because they hang their clothes on lines out the windows. The humidity will definitely not let them dry, but the other issue is, most horrifying to me, that their cockroaches fly.

Taipei struck me as pretty clean & modern. The people, few that there were because it was a Lunar holiday so most people were gone, struck me as overall pretty good-looking—better-looking than the Koreans, which is funny because Korean dramas are very popular there, & I was told they think a lot of the stars are really good looking. So, it was far too small a sample of people to get much of an idea of anything except my terror of the cockroaches covering the sidewalks at night. I can’t tell you how terrible I feel for Mercedes having to witness every scream & jump that occurred really every few feet every night. Apparently when the Taipeians are away the sidewalks are theirs.

I also learned a lot about Mandarin, which Mercedes & Andy were staying in Taiwan to study. For one thing, there are 2 scripts. Simplified, which is the one used in mainland China now, which came from the Cultural Revolution. And classic, which of course has lots more lines & is what is used in Taiwan. Basically, as you’d guess, simplified was supposed to make the ornate characters simpler, to make reading & writing easier. Their friends in Taiwan suggested they study classic because it’s what’s used there & would allow them to read simplified too. Funnily enough, that seems only to be true to native speakers, because honestly, to my totally untrained eye & Mercedes’, uh, much more studied eye, there is little resemblance at all, so they can’t read simplified, & switched to that—the impetus for Mercedes to learn Chinese was working in China all those years but never being able to speak it. Initially, it was so when she went back to visit she could better communicate, but she is considering working for a year or two, if she can, so that they money spent on travelling the world could be made back & put toward building her own home, as she has always wanted.

Leaving the reading and writing, then you get into the tones. Well, sort of. We’ve all heard it’s a tonal language, so yes, the tones help dictate the meaning of the word. But more than that, it’s also, even more so, a contextual language. Mercedes showed me the meaning of one tone’s “yo” sound. This one sound with that particular tone had no less than 60 different meanings, some of which even contradicted each other. You also may have heard that there is no past tense in Chinese. For tense & the one meaning that the speaker intended for pretty much every word/sound they utter requires using the rest of the sentence or sentences around it. Hence, Mercedes could never just give one sentence in an email to her coworkers to translate, because it could mean any vast number of things when there are no other sentences around it to tell them if this sentence is about shirts, women, boats, the sun, a leader, a loser, yellow, flies, or God only knows what. Nevertheless, they were both doing well using the language, especially Andy who was studying a bit more consistently than Mercedes, & seemed to be really latching on to the different rules, etc.

We took a cooking class, making various kinds of dumplings, & shockingly my absolute favorite was the sesame seed dessert ones. & I learned that juniper berries are an awesome addition to dishes, only not when they’re green because eating them causes stomach cramps.

Our sesame dumplings

      

Drinks menu & dumplings at restaurant

Otherwise, Mercedes & I spent a good amount of time on our class’ reunion page, where pics from the reunion neither of us attended were. There were a lot of surprises, mainly in how Mercedes, who could never remember the names of people she’d worked with for years, only knowing them by the nicknames she gave them, was suddenly remembering more names of people than I did. This is unprecedented in the 20-some years we’ve been friends. Not only was she the one remembering names & jogging my memory, but she could often place the faces that had changed a lot in 20 years to those names. For the love of God, she remembered this guy Tom that I always called TJ, who ate lunch with me & some friends junior or senior year of high school (she rarely, or never, ate with us because she graduated early, so had more classes). She’s also friends with a lot more people on facebook than I am, so was updating me on them.

I really enjoyed high school, & I never thought I’d never forget pretty much anyone. So the fact that 10 & now 20 years had erased all but my immediate friends was really surprising.

There was one more surprise though, & that was my somewhat new & very different feelings about people from the LHS reunion pics who had also gone to my elementary school. Everyone who was in 6^th grade at St. Luke’s except for Katie, the other girl who was severely harassed along with me, was grouped in with the worst offenders, & I wanted nothing to do with any of them, at all, ever. They were all guilty by association. So when I was still an infrequent user of fb & got a friend request from a girl who I really don’t remember adding to the list of people making my life hell, I was outraged. Did she not remember what happened? How exactly could you forget? No one could avoid it, they could just ignore it at best or join in. But even probably 5-7 years ago, that wasn’t enough for me to see your nonparticipation as not guilty. So I was very surprised to see a comment from the boy I’d had a crush on during the first half of 6^th grade, and think not only that I had no bad feelings toward him (he hadn’t been one of the harassers), but more to the point, felt curious about him.

For a week I couldn’t stop thinking about how I kind of wanted to at least send a friend request, but wasn’t completely sure I should since it was so unprecedented for me to want to reach out to anyone at school that year. I scrolled through his friend list, & none of the offenders were there. I decided to send it. From what I could see of his profile, he was rarely, if ever, on there, so maybe he wouldn’t even see it, never mind consider it.

Usually when I send a request to someone I haven’t seen in years, I send a short message too. I didn’t send one to Jeff, because I still couldn’t figure out what exactly I would say. It was another few weeks after he accepted the request that I finally just said I wondered how he was doing. He wrote back—he seems to be a very laid-back guy who paid no attention to English class & punctuation. In any event, I’m surprisingly glad I did it.

Weirdly, a couple of months ago I started dealing with a lot of leftover feelings from that year, mainly in the way of recognizing that doing the typical victim thing & turning all the feelings on myself had been the wrong thing to do, & working on forgiving myself for doing that. Since then, the rest of life has taken over & I haven’t ruminated on what happened or the fallout since. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll finally be able to leave the past in the past.