The Old Capital: A Novel of Taipei

*I was at St. Mark’s Square, watching the acrobatic flights of angels and the dancing of the Moors, but, without you, my dear, the loneliness was unbearable.

Back then, the sky was much bluer, so blue it made you feel as if the ocean were close by, drawing you to it, and making the cumulus clouds seem even whiter, like castles sculpted out of snow. The sun shone intensely through clean air that threw up no barriers, but strangely, you didn’t feel its heat. You just stood there foolishly in an unshaded spot, not knowing where to spend the afternoon, yet showing no signs of heatstroke.

Back then, bodily fluids and tears were as fresh and clear as the dew on flowers; people were more willing to let them fall if that was what felt natural.

Back then, people were so simple, so naïve, they were often willing to sacrifice themselves over a belief or a loved one, whatever their party affiliation.

Back then, before commercial real estate had led to an unrestrained opening of new roads, a building boom, and land speculation, trees could survive and grow tall and green, like those in tropical rain forests.

Back then, there were few public places, virtually no cafés, fast-food restaurants, iced tea shops, or KTV, and pubs were virtually unheard of, so young people had only the streets to roam, yet they did not surge through town like white mice.

Back then, on summer nights you could see the Milky Way and shooting stars, and watching them for a long, long time spawned an awareness of the vicissitudes of life and death, of dynasties rising and falling. Especially foolish spectators vowed to do something spectacular so as not to end up wasting their lives.

Back then, your background music, if you had a brother or sister in college, would likely be the Beatles. If it was the beginning of the 1970s, you’d be playing “Candida” nonstop, then in the next year it would be “Knock Three Times” by the same group. If it was late 1969, then you’d have listened to “Aquarius.” Every third song played on the TV show Happy Palace would be by the black group The 5th Dimension. If it was a bit earlier than that, you’d have heard “Can’t Take My Eyes off of You” by The Graduates. People who missed it then could have heard it in the bar scene in The Deer Hunter ten years later.

Since you were fond of Don McLean’s “Vincent” and “American Pie,” we need to move the time forward two years—let me check my data: “Vincent” made it to the pop charts on May 13, 1972, so this makes it the summer of 1972. You turned a deaf ear to “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night, the hottest song at dance parties, and, of course, you ignored “Black & White,” an even bigger hit by the same group, which came out after that summer, because you were engrossed in the Donghua English Dictionary you’d just bought to look up the meanings of words in the lyrics.

Starry starry night…. On the same kind of starry night, you and A were lying on a wooden bed. You still recall how the moon shone through the window and cast its light, along with shadows of wisteria and the window screen, on your bodies. You forget what led up to it, but you recall saying, “I’m not getting married, no matter what.” A laughed in the dark. “That’d be terrible for so-and-so.” So-and-so, a student in the same grade as you at the boys’ school, was bombarding you with letters. A gentle face with a large nose and big eyes floated in front of you. A long silence before A added, “Wonder if it’d be fun to be gay.” You didn’t reply. Maybe you’d had too much fun during the day, and so you fell asleep without exchanging another word, the young bodies of two seventeen-year-olds, like purring cats.

*The first lunar month in the seventh year of the Xianfeng reign, a major snowfall in Tamsui.²⁰

Neither of you ever had a chance to learn if it’d be fun to be gay. You were too busy; in the space of a year or two, the emotions stirred up inside and all those tears that weren’t necessarily shed in sadness constituted a great deal more than the sum total of what you would experience over the next twenty years.

You two left town whenever you felt like it. If you rode the train line that had been completed the first year of the century, instead of taking empty seats, you sat on the stairs by the door and sang songs you’d just memorized into the wind. If it was the summer of the following year, you’d surely be singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.” Sometimes you took the bus. Back then, North Gate had yet to be tyrannized by an overpass, so you could walk past it casually, feeling like one of your ancestors heading out of town a century before. You’d walk past the railway office and board the bus at Izumi-machi, I-chome and within a quarter of an hour you’d arrive at Dadu Road, which, fifteen years later, would be famous for motorbike racing.

Traveling sixty miles an hour, the bus would roar through Guandu Temple Pass, where the wide river appeared before you, and each time you would be deeply moved, or you would breathe in the damp river and ocean air before saying to your companion, who was seeing it for the first time, “Doesn’t that look like the Yangtze River?”

When the bus passed Zhuwei in the afternoon, the setting sun would send its rays across the rippling surface from the Guanyin Mountains on the opposite bank. Sandbars overgrown with yellow hibiscuses and mangroves, as well as the small egrets, buffalo herons, and night herons perched on them, would call to mind the lines “Clear streams meander through the Hanyang Woods/Fragrant grasses spread across Parrot Islet.”²¹

You did not go to see A’s male friends every time. They were hard to find, in spite of their large numbers. Some lived, commune-style, in traditional farmhouses, all but tilling the land to grow their own food. One of them lived in Youchekou on the outskirts of town, which gave him a perfect excuse to miss classes, and that made him even more difficult to find. They said he spent most of his time at the Mountain Work Club. When he wasn’t busy, he’d be out sketching terraced rice paddies by Xinghuadian or pencil-drawing old houses along rebuilt streets. Another one lived in town above a pool hall. Sleeping during the day and going out at night, he was incomprehensibly careless about his appearance. Photographs he’d taken filled the walls in his room, mostly faces of weatherworn, unisex-looking old folks. But you saw a photo of A, who bared her shoulders, with only a scarf draped across her chest. You wondered about when she’d had that picture taken, as well as …

It didn’t matter whether you found her friends or not, and eventually you’d end up on Qingshui Street, after passing through the traditional open market that scared you witless. You did not go to Longshan Temple, even though one of A’s boyfriends, an architecture major, took great pleasure in inviting you to eat salty peanuts, boiled in their shells, under the pillars in front of the temple, where he’d tell you all about the temple’s history and architecture. With mixed feelings of curiosity and sympathy, you’d walk past small hotels manned by old pimps and arrive at Qingshuiyan Temple. You never drew inscribed lots, nor were you interested in the faithful, men or women. Instead, you’d walk past the gilt-paper incinerator, which was shrouded in white smoke the year round, and onto the narrow path halfway up the hill. On the right were either stone walls covered with weeds and moss or residential brick walls; on the other side was the spot where the wide river met the ocean. You ignored the single-ridge southern Min–style houses, with their slanted roofs, agreeing that it was a San Francisco sort of view, even though neither of you had ever been there.

When you reached the end of the path, you’d have to pass through someone’s kitchen to return to Chongjian Street, the oldest street in town, the one you couldn’t wait to get away from. Resigned to a return to reality, you’d walk past fresh fish stalls, pork sellers, giant cauldrons that fried fish the year round, and Fuyou Temple, built during the reign of the Yongzhen Emperor, before coming to narrow Zhongzheng Road, where you’d take care not to be hit by a bus. Before long, you would be following familiar steps up the narrow alley facing the ferry landing, where lush green seasonal weeds forever peeked out through the cracks. It was as if you were going home, except for the part about calling out to the folks at #2 and #4, “Tadaima”—I’m back.

The wrought-iron gate on the wall around Red Mansion was locked sometimes, but you could always get in. You two would sit on the low wall facing the river, and neither the chinaberry nor the flame tree, not even the grove of unruly bamboo, could block out the sun or the ocean winds. Sometimes, when a sea of fiery red flowers covered the flame tree, you felt as if you were in Spain or some small Mediterranean town.

Red Tower, beige in the colonial style, had been a shipping tycoon’s mansion at the end of the previous century, and his descendants did not know what to do with the place. It was currently the lair, à la the People’s Commune, of a bunch of boys, all students from the nearby university and vocational college. Some of them skipped class and stayed in bed until the afternoon, then stood bare-chested on the balcony, staring down at you like idiots. Others, who had just awakened from erotic dreams, whistled or shouted menacingly, “Hey, didn’t you see the NO TRESPASSING sign on the gate?”

You’d look up at them nonchalantly. Their underwear would be drying on the balcony, flapping in the wind like banners.

From where you sat, on the short wall, as if on a ship about to set sail, you could almost see the captain enter in his log: “6:30 AM, N34°26´ E17°28´, a 20-knot western wind, heading 330….”

A, who shared your feelings, gestured a lot when she talked. You wished you had her body, all 5’6” of it, with the square shoulders of a swimmer and long, lanky limbs. She had breasts too, but they were more like an athlete’s muscled chest. You hated your body, with its narrow waist, full breasts it was impossible to hide, and girlish hands and feet. Paradoxically, you sometimes wished you were more like Song, A’s best friend in junior high, whom she talked about all the time. Which book, which teacher, which movie Song liked the best, what kind of food she hated, and what kinds of boys disgusted her. Song was an only child. She and A agreed that they just had to get into the same senior high, but Song was sick during the month before the entrance exams and only made it into a girls’ high school on the city’s south side…. You hadn’t met Song, but no one ever existed in this world as clearly and unambiguously as she.

One time you and A skipped class to see a double feature at Qingkang for 20 NT, because one of them starred George Chakiris, A’s current obsession. When the movie ended, you heard someone call A’s name. It was a tiny yet clear voice, and you knew instinctively it must be Song. You were right. Dressed in a lime yellow school uniform, Song was so tiny that A reached out and, in dramatic fashion, picked her up and spun her twice in the air. When A made the introductions, you were attentive to Song’s eyes on you—very big, very dark, and very empty.

Without the least hesitation, A walked with Song to the bus stop and saw her home.

Refusing to walk alone across the quiet, gray baseball field, now that there was no game, fearful of being reminded that those ballplayers, who were about your age, were also getting old, you crossed to the other side of the street, which, to your surprise, was overgrown with weeds. Five years later a giant billboard would be erected on that spot, outlandishly claiming it as the future site of the largest hotel and shopping mall in all of Southeast Asia.²² Another five years would pass and the hotel complex would be completed, and then even later you would actually be married in one of the banquet rooms of the “outlandish” five-star hotel.

Walking alone on the weedy path and looking at the fiery red sunset, in a tiny voice you sang to yourself “When the Sunset Rages in the Sky,” a song your school choir had been practicing. When you got to “My love, my love, let me wish you the best …,” snow flurries filled the air.

*In the disgusting green and slippery damp city, the aging Governor had ancient eyes.—D.H. Lawrence

But this is how the Hundred Flowers Calendar described the lunar seventh month: in the seventh month, the hollyhocks turn crimson, corfu lilies caress the head, crepe myrtles are submerged in the moon, hibiscuses face the sun, knotweeds bloom red, and waternut flowers grow full.

In any case, in order to create a contrast with the Wedgwood blue September sky, all the flowers in the red category bloom: South American purple jasmine, Oriental coral tree, large-blossomed crepe myrtle, red ixora, lady’s slipper, Chinese hibiscus, canna…. In particular, the Chinese hibiscus, known for reaching over walls from under eaves, left a deep impression on the group of young and middle-aged men who arrived in 1949, and the Portuguese and Spaniards who came to save souls and obtain pepper 300 years earlier. The later group, away from their homelands for so long, were driven to the brink of madness as they recalled similar blue skies, white walls, green trees, red flowers, black hair, dark brows and lashes, and love songs like “Let me look at you, girl from Lima, let me tell you about the glory of dreams, dreams that awaken memories of ancient bridges, rivers, and forests….” The name of the song might well have been “Cinnamon Flowers.”

Actually, nonred flowers also bloomed, including Burmese gardenias, which we called egg flowers, with their white petals and yellow pistils (you could, for instance, spot them in the courtyard of the Presbyterian church on Shijō-tō or at No. 2, Lane 3, Tai’an Street). Their subtle sweetness, with a slight medicinal odor, often stirred up a bit of melancholy in mothers who were rushing to work and sending kids to school; about how they could, as in so many Septembers in the past, go to school with new uniforms, new classmates, new classrooms, new teachers. Everything was new and unknown, thus filled with endless possibilities. Even though people set up rules telling you what to do and what not to do, you could be completely free, truly free outside of the rules. Not the sort of freedom you think you have now in choosing between a job at 42,000 or 45,000 a month, and definitely not the sort of freedom to choose between a Montessori or Flubber kindergarten or the American-style Orff school for your kids.

You would take full advantage of that freedom. Twenty years later, politically correct writers, when dealing with this period, would surely have you participating in such activities as demonstrations against the Japanese occupation of Diaoyu Island or the million-hour-contribution movement initiated after Taiwan’s withdrawal from the UN or the Aboriginal Service Club. If not, the writers would arrange for you a father or grandfather who was a victim of the incident of many years before, or have you secretly distribute flyers for Guo Yuxin and Kang Ningxiang. Or you would be a conscientious reader of Free China or Grand Learning Magazine, which would lead to enlightenment. If not that, at least you’d be itching for a fight over the termination of diplomatic relations with Japan, scheduled for the end of that year. Like most people around you, you were ignorant about everything mentioned above. Around 400 A.D., people stopped believing in Zeus; by around 1650 A.D., no one believed in shamans anymore; in 1700, doubts about God’s revelations began to spread. Isn’t everything like that? The glory and suffering of an age always belong only to a few sages, shamans, and sorcerers.

You couldn’t have cared less about school starting. Like fun-loving people of every generation, you could always find ways to skip school, no matter which one you were attending. Your school was located in Bumbu-machi and the first thing you saw when you left the school grounds was the Governor-General’s Office. The building was less than four decades older than you, but it gave the impression of being old and decrepit. Without giving it a second thought, you assumed it had a history going back at least a century or two, but at other times you assumed it had been built by the Nationalist government, which came over with your parents’ generation.

You reached Hon-machi, Book Street, after passing the square in front of the government building, which sometimes was packed with commuter buses and at other times was deserted. You seldom had time for the bookstores, especially the dark, gloomy, coldly ancient bookstores that felt like Chinese herbal shops, for they reminded you too much of the literature or history class you’d just gotten out of.

You usually took the train, where you sat on the steps by the door, oblivious that you were blocking the passage. How could so many housewives be getting on and off, all going grocery shopping? The train traveled through the ugliest part of the city, so the petulant families, as if by prior agreement, lined the tracks with their back doors, illegal constructions, public toilets, vegetable gardens, and garbage dumps, steeping the area in a village flavor, even though the train passed through Kensei-chō, Owari-machi, and Hōrai-machi, the most prosperous districts of a bygone era.

Sometimes you left the train at Miyanoshita, but if you were too absorbed in your conversation, you got off at Shilin. The small station at Miyanoshita was like other small stations along the line. Most of those still standing ten years later would appear in coffee commercials or short-subject government documentaries to advertise economic accomplishments. The vacant ground in front of the platform and station office would often be carpeted in Korean grass, with its exotic fragrance, and several pretty flowers with a Southeast Asian flair, like multicolored purslanes, lantanas, poisonous leopard lilies, and monthly roses. The occasional attempt to plant Chinese peonies and tree peonies was doomed to failure. Equally difficult to grow were temperate-zone araucaria and arhat pines, which, seen against the whitewashed wall and station house built of stained fir, brought solace to many homesick soldiers.

For the same reason, a 10,000-cherry-tree movement was initiated during the war, hoping the islanders would, like the soldiers, fall in love with the unique, tragic, and resolute beauty of cherry blossoms. They planted an enormous number of hikan cherries, omisha cherries, double cherries on Grass Mountain, Wushe, and Nanfang’ao, which is how this particular station came to have a row of hikan cherry trees. Except for a week of hasty blooming around the Lunar New Year, their pale, bare figures were hidden under mastlike betel palms, as if inflicted with an autistic lack of confidence. Yes, there were definitely betel palms, as in a photograph of soldiers from the end of the previous century, in which an oxcart moves slowly under the shadow of trees that sway in the wind, as if cut out of paper. The corner of the photo is inscribed “Impression of the South,” making you feel like taking a bath in the afternoon and cooling off in yukata and geta.

There had to be betel palms, for they could be seen around public schools, post offices, government buildings, and churches built in the Taisho or early Showa periods. At least there had to be fan palms, coconut palms, and date palms, which are similar in shape and style. There were more than a dozen fan palms in front of the rickety classroom building at your primary school, which was built in the fifth year of the century, isn’t that so? You could more or less sense the age of the school, or else why did you run over to dig beneath a banyan tree after school, convinced you’d find an antique treasure to enrich your parents, who had fled the war and come to this side of the strait, bringing with them nothing of value? Your persistence sustained you through the third grade, but the results were far from satisfactory, for you were rewarded with a scant few shards of dark green pottery from an unknown period, which you entrusted to your mother for safekeeping. The yellow earth, smoothed by bare feet over decades, was cool and solid to the touch; the banyan fruit, no matter how pretty it looked, was wormy. When you opened it, you had to carefully lick the wormless part with the tip of your tongue for the sweetness; those palms, whose leaves were used to make fans, swished in the wind and made you sleepy; the shiny green nuts were so hard, so solid you cut them with a broken tile, smashed them with a brick, even gnawed them with your teeth, eager to know what treasure was hidden inside. There also had to be ocean dates, Taiwanese ocean dates, or else how could those men 300 years ago gaze upon a coastline teeming with Taiwanese ocean dates and shout, “Ilha Formosa!”? It didn’t matter that this was said to be the twelfth “beautiful island” they’d so named on their eastbound voyage.

You really missed the time when, in that dark, red brick auditorium that was scheduled to be demolished, several hundred primary school children shouted your school song at the top of their lungs, “Bailu Mountain and Neihu Hill Are Our Best Shields.” The song was rhythmless because you were shouting. Back then you had no idea that, except for Bailu Mountain, the public school located by Neihu Hill in Seven Star County was completely unknown to the seventh principal, Kobori Yoshihei, who had taken over in the seventh year of the Taishō era, after the end of the war in Europe. Nor did you know that Akanabe Misao, an earlier principal, had later described Neihu as a “purple mountain with clear water.” Your only concern was that neither of your two best friends in class took the same route as you, making it impossible to goof off on the way home once you were out of the student monitor’s jurisdiction. On sunny winter afternoons, you took turns jumping from the path onto farmers’ haystacks. One of your best friends belonged to the Gangqian Route, the other, the Shisifen Route. The Shishifen Route had once had about ten students, but she was the only one left, since those in the higher grades had to stay after school to study and those in the lower grades went home at noon. She told you she had to walk two hours on a mountain path to get to school, and in the winter, she had to get up before dawn. Two hours! Wouldn’t that take you all the way to Taipei city?

Later on you learned to read grownups’ newspapers. When she was late for school, you had trouble listening in class, because you were afraid she’d run into bad people and be raped on Bailu Mountain. Hey! Where was Shisifen, you wondered. And Hey! again, what about Donghu, which you heard was also two hours away on foot? And the ones from Donghu were always the last to pay their tuition, usually when the semester was half over and after being beaten daily by the teacher. But Donghu students were indispensable during school celebration sports meets. There were usually Donghu boys in your classes; they were dark and quiet, like oxen, and none of them cried or screamed under the teacher’s savage beatings. Sooner or later, the teacher would curse them: “Are you taking mute medicine?” You felt sorry for them, but were never romantically involved with any of them.

If they hadn’t sold off their land over the next twenty years, they’d have been billionaires by now.

*Beyond the yuccas and Chinese hibiscuses was the ocean.

One night twenty years later, when you were blind drunk for reasons you can no longer recall, you lay prone in your dark, silent bedroom, where, with eyes unfocused but absolute mental clarity, you watched as your seventeen-year-old bodies, clad in school uniforms, book bags on your backs, took a danger-laden path under a gourd trellis in a yard teeming with chickens and ducks (neither of you knew how to speak Taiwanese, and you were afraid you wouldn’t be able to explain to the farmer who owned the house that you were using the trellis as a shortcut and had no intention of stealing his gourds). The ground beneath your feet had turned to soft, yellow, fine sand, making for tough going on the gentle slope. Dirty Chinese hibiscuses were abloom with giant yellow flowers, blocking the cold rain that had been falling for some time. The seasonal change of uniform had yet to take place, but you didn’t feel the cold in your short-sleeved shirts. Wasn’t it always like that back then? You didn’t feel the cold, you didn’t feel the heat, you were never hungry, and you were never fatigued, so long as you had enough to occupy your mind and heart.

So with enough to occupy your mind and heart, you walked past the Chinese hibiscuses, cut between the yuccas and sisal, which occasionally nicked you with their serrated leaves but didn’t hurt. Giant, two- or three-meter-long stamens covered in big, white, fleshy flowers rose out of the centers of the sisal. Against the ocean, which was not far off and easily visible, the stamens looked like ships’ masts, a scene nearly identical to that which the Canadian doctor Mackay had seen a century earlier upon his arrival from the province of Ontario.

Beyond the yuccas and Chinese hibiscuses was the ocean. You told yourselves not to forget the password repeated to you over and over by one of A’s boyfriends the first time he took you through the secret passage. Summer was over and the coastline was again under the tight control of the coastal defense garrison, so that was the only way to keep from being seen by naval personnel on the base. You could not know that, at the same time on the same day, 88 years earlier, the French navy launched an attack on that spot, their ships’ big guns covering the 800 marines who came ashore at Shalun. The defenders fired from makeshift battlements to lure the enemy inland. The French fell for the trick and entered a dense forest of yucca and Chinese hibiscus, where their machine guns and cannons were ineffective, leaving them no choice but to engage in hand-to-hand combat with knives. You had memorized Qing history for the exams, so you knew every big and small battle and the subsequent treaties from the beginning of the Daoguang reign,²³ but you could not recall this life-and-death skirmish or its outcome in the dense forest of yucca and Chinese hibiscus.

Unlike the ghosts of the French soldiers who were lost here eighty-eight years earlier, you passed through the yucca and Chinese hibiscus with ease under their envious gaze.

Most of the time it was only the two of you. Purple ipomoea flowers blanketed the ground, at the end of which was the ocean, the bright gray ocean. Moist air turned the place where the ocean met the sky misty. Already drenched, you walked side by side on the beach, each singing your favorite song to yourself, engrossed in similar scenes in your favorite movies, so there was nothing to talk about. It was no one’s fault that you’d always believed that this ocean was the largest in the world, and that filled you with boundless fantasies of pirates and adventurers from centuries ago.

The low, cloudy sky that seemed to press down on your brows and lashes usually reminded you of Ryan’s Daughter, but if it had been ten years later, it would have been The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Like repressed, dark, gloomy England, with its raging undercurrent, it was the opposite of a summer beach.

Salt-filled breezes over a summer beach, especially after sunset, seemed to possess you and wouldn’t let you leave. The sand, retaining the dying heat of the sun, caressed you as music flew in all directions. Sometimes the music was real, coming from the portable cassette players of lingering visitors. Dispersed by the wind, the music seemed to come and go lazily. How wonderful if it happened to be playing Frankie Avalon’s “Why.” Whoever missed the song would hear it repeated twenty years later in Edward Yang’s movie A Brighter Summer Day. In any case, under circumstances created by these combined factors, plus a fire burning with driftwood collected by an industrious individual, you’d wish you had a boy next to you, so the two of you could lie on the beach oblivious to how people might see you. You’d feel so warm and secure in his arms that you’d happily be turned into a woman, no matter who he was.

You looked at A, next to you, and wondered why she’d never been the object of your fantasies.

When the sky merged with the ocean, you lost your sense of direction and, without realizing it, wound up at the headwater of the Gongsitian Stream, where you were stopped, and Guanyin Mountain leaped into view as you turned around. When the weather improved, you could see clouds on the top of the mountain. And when a strong wind arose, the clouds raced across the sky, as if Guanyin Mountain were performing Daoist breathing exercises. Few people lived on the mountain back then, and only one house about midway up turned on a light when it got dark, which made it appear as a lonely glistening tear coursing down a cheek, like that night when you were all liquored up for reasons you can no longer remember, and you shed tears too.

With calm composure, you listened as A chattered away about her boyfriends. You didn’t care; the only taboo topic was Song. You would feel the damp coldness from your clothes travel down your spine the moment she mentioned Song; then your heart would shrivel, like a tiny fist, smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, until it hung forlornly, beyond all help.

The beach was deserted in the fall. You were oblivious to the spirits of the dead wandering around you, including the one who went swimming one winter a few years before and was swallowed up by a shark, and the Samaritan who drowned while trying to save someone at Xinghuadian a few years later, including your own.

*When the Qing government took over Taiwan, there was talk in the court about laying waste to it.

When there was a hint of fall in the air, you’d get off the train at Miyanoshita Station, or Jiantan if you were taking the bus—Jiantan was less than half a mile from Dalang bengshe at the northern end of the Tamsui River, where the natives rowed their boats in and the channel was wide. A tree called the nightshade was so tall it blocked out the sun, so big it required several linked arms to encircle its trunk. It grew by the lakeshore. A Dutchman was rumored to have stuck his sword into the tree, which grew around it; that’s how the place got its name, Jiantan—Sword Lake.

Of course that didn’t square with what you knew about Jiantan. When you were five, your parents dressed you up and took you for your first visit to the zoo and the children’s amusement park. After getting off the bus, you didn’t want to go anywhere else, for there in front of you was a carnival square, so big, so bustling there was much more joy in the air than at Disneyland, to which you would take your daughter thirty years later. The air seemed filled with colorful balloons, bubbles, and music; there were smells and shouts from all sorts of food stalls; and giant billboards blocked out the top of Maruyama, or Yuanshan—Rounded Hill. The billboards were unremarkable: no pictures, just words, ads for the few national enterprises, such as Tatung electric fans, White Flower Oil, Ta-hsin Raincoats, or inspirational slogans by the government. Tiny structures that looked like ticket booths were crammed full of toys that, looking back, must have been truly cheap and ugly, so no wonder your parents had refused to buy you any.

Within the next two or three years, the remaining Japanese Shinto shrines would be cleared away from Maruyama and replaced by the Chinese palace-style Grand Hotel for foreign VIPs. The illegal buildings at the foot of the hill would be razed, like a circus that, as soon as the performance is over, packs up its tents and moves out overnight. Not until twenty years later, on a visit to Cairo, did it dawn on you that the peddlers had actually migrated to Egypt. You were on a tourist bus, the air conditioning going full blast, when you discovered that the traffic-clogged streets were packed with booths where ugly snacks, plastic toys, and other unknown objects were sold. You had no idea who would want to buy that junk, but then you saw a young couple with dark skin and big eyes who were holding the hands of their child and studiously asking the price of this and that. You pressed your face against the bus window, unable to peel yourself away from the sight.

There was a hint of autumn in the air. Back then, neither of you had ever left this island, where it never snows, even in the winter, so how could you have known what autumn was like?

In the ninth month of the lunar calendar, the chrysanthemums bloom, the hibiscuses wither, the campions grow fuzz, leaves of the calthrops and lilies dry out on the river, the oranges appear, and the yams turn milky…. No, no, it’s definitely not because there were chrysanthemums and osmanthus (if your father had come from another province), or hibiscuses and tree orchids (if your father was local Taiwanese), or wisterias and arhat pines (if your ancestors had spoken Japanese), or eucalyptuses and breadfruit trees (if your ancestors had fought in the South Pacific, even Australia, as imperial soldiers). You’d know autumn was here when you stood on the Meiji Bridge, designed by Togaro Katarō, and could feel the wind coming from somewhere far, far away; how very sad. If it was a clear day, the sky would be incredibly vast. When you were feeling low, one of you would recall a line of poetry or an adage from a wise man you’d read a few days before. Then you’d turn vague and illusive, which was enough to prove that autumn had indeed come to the island.

Additional proof was in the fragrance of sweet gum trees that lined the narrow path, even though they remained a scorched yellow and never turned bright red. But that was enough for you. You walked down Chokushi Avenue, completed at the turn of the century, imagining you were in one of the thirteen New England states. It was all the fault of the MAAG dormitory, with its whitewashed walls, large windows, chimneys, and lush green lawn, a typical scene from a 1950s Hollywood movie. It was all the fault of off-duty GIs, who were seen on the street from time to time, and who chatted you up, gentlemanly. It was all the fault of those of you who were engrossed in the TV show Peyton Place, with its small-town affairs. If you didn’t loaf around after school, you’d get home in time to see the show. It really didn’t matter if you missed some episodes, since it had been running for more than two years and the plot hadn’t progressed much, even though you’d watched it from the age of fourteen or fifteen all the way up to seventeen. You weren’t that crazy about Ryan O’Neal, who would become famous later; you felt somehow that you were more like Mia Farrow’s character, Allison, who was intent upon leaving the small town for Boston or New York to be a writer. You felt something acutely similar between you and her, since for no identifiable reason you wanted to leave the place where you were born and raised.

Even though the sweet gum trees did not turn red, you felt that autumn had arrived, and so you walked to Hotel Loma, where you crossed the street diagonally. Usually there were lots of GIs standing outside waiting for taxis. You were too shy to look closely at the sculpture on the hotel façade, and wondered why two babies were suckling on a dog. Roughly twenty years later, when you were reading Greek and Roman myths to your daughter, it occurred to you that the sculpture was a Roman creation myth and that “Loma” actually was “Roma.” Across the street from Loma was Caves Bookstore, but you did not go in. Among the bookstores you did not visit, besides Caves, were Gold Mountain and Linkou Book Company, since they sold only English books. For you they were like a foreign concession, where Chinese and dogs were forbidden entry. In the concession near St. Christopher’s Church was an Oriental arts and crafts shop that targeted foreigners. There were also Qingguang Market; Fuli Bakery; Rose Marie Restaurant; Meiqi Hotel; Dream Café; CAT, the airline owned by Chen Xiangmei, widow of Flying Tiger Claire Chennault; The Roundtable; and the fountain in front of the Jiaxin Building.

One day, A wanted to buy a pair of genuine Levi’s^® jeans allegedly brought out from the PX, so you entered the maze of Qingguang Market. Feeling that every woman in sight was a bar girl, you had no time to dispense sympathy; instead you studied them wide-eyed, amazed to discover how ordinary they looked, and how they were fond of rice-noodle soup and pork-liver sausage. You must have also gone into Fuli Bakery, where there were pastries and candy you found only in translated novels, and which gave you the feeling of being in a foreign country. For example, Christmas puddings that were available only at year’s end, bread made with strange spices, abundant meaty products, butter, a variety of jams and jellies, black tea…. Enough for you to fantasize about a life ten times better than the KMT could supply, though in reality your allowance would have been used up by buying a single chocolate-covered nut. No wonder one of you vowed to splurge on chocolate with your first paycheck.

At the end of that year,²⁴ Japan was about to sever diplomatic ties with the island. The government, in order to calm the people, produced one slogan after another, which moved you so much you started up a donation campaign during one of the class meetings. You donated your chocolate money. You also launched campaigns to give blood and sign petitions in blood, and would have performed such public service as sweeping the street in front of the school gate and assisting with traffic control if your class monitor hadn’t dissuaded you from doing so.

The donation of a single piece of chocolate candy did not provide adequate outlet for your energy or patriotic sentiments, so you went with A to look up her boyfriends at the university, where you casually cut your finger, supplying enough blood to draw a stroke on one of the characters written on a giant sheet of white cloth. With emotions still raging, you followed them as they thronged to the campus store, an old, dark, frosty warehouse structure likely left behind from the colonial era, which made you wish you could grow up fast. Or maybe it was the vines you thought were holly that covered the window, or the surrounding tall paperbark trees found in temperate-zone countries, for even the air was cool and dry. You noticed that one of the boys, who looked a little like Ryan O’Neal, had been stealing glances at you, and you smiled, pitying him for no apparent reason.

Strangely, though, none of this was in conflict with real life. You continued to stroll in the Concession and watched as a man with fair skin and a high nose took one of your female compatriots by the arm like an old imperialist after the Opium War. As they walked along, he tickled her and made her cackle. You didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary about the scene, seemingly having forgotten the accusations and protest written on the cloth that included a bit of your blood.

On the same evening 20 years later, you and your husband would go to a gathering purported to have been attended by 100,000 people. You racked your brain but could not fathom where that soccer stadium had come from and what the place had been used for before the stadium materialized. And that wasn’t the only thing that puzzled you. Your original intention had been to donate some money, a meager contribution to help unseat the ruling party, like giving blood for a single stroke on a written character years before, and then leave. In the end, of course, you couldn’t make your way out through the crowd. More importantly, your husband of nearly 20 years wasn’t about to leave. When you looked at him, his blurred face displaying the same expression as the tens of thousands of faces around him, he could have been a total stranger who was shouting and clapping in response to the spotlighted speakers. Finally, when a campaign aide said something about how people with a provincial background like yours ought to get out and go back to China, your husband cast you a frenzied glance, as if afraid you’d be identified and driven off by the people around you.

That night, with the residual excitement still raging inside him, your husband attacked you with movements and rhythms the likes of which he’d never used before. You lay in the dark refusing to shed a tear, while he did what he wanted. It had been many years since you’d last cried, because tears were too salty. Sweat was salty too. You couldn’t say when it started, but a strange and repellant odor slowly began to appear on you. At first you thought it was the result of childbirth. You’d spent a week in the hospital and come home with a pleasant mixture of smells: the hospital’s fresh, clean disinfectant; baby oil; medicine; and breast milk. But it didn’t take long for the fragrance to disappear. The first time you discovered that the strange odor clung to you, you returned assiduously to the shampoo, hand soap, and laundry powder you’d used before. But twenty-odd years of the same odor was gone; it had been with you for over two decades without your noticing it, and you realized you’d had it only after you’d lost it. What remained was a salty odor that easily crystallized; the dirty, salty smell must have had a completely different molecular structure than the salt in the ocean. There were things you could neither avoid nor change, like bodily fluids or sweat, but not tears, and that is why you refused to shed them.

You couldn’t help but think of the five failings of a deity: ears turning deaf, eyes going blind, nose getting dull, facial complexion turning sallow, splendid clothes covered in dust.

Refusing to admit that your ears were turning deaf or your eyes going blind, you decided to go alone to the football stadium on the postelection holiday, in the daytime, for you were shocked and distressed to be unable to recall what had originally been at the site, even though you’d spent most of your life in the city’s eastern district and hadn’t been off the island for a single moment over the past twenty years.

You got off at the bus at Jiantan one ordinary winter afternoon, just as you’d done at the age of seventeen. Except for the absence of the friend who’d skipped class with you, you were immensely pleased by the smell of late autumn in the air. You nearly said “Long time no see” to the trees, which were much taller and much greener now, and you quickly contained your shock and disbelief at the sight of the MRT station, ugly and gigantic beyond belief, for it destroyed the skyline’s beauty. When you were seventeen the sky wasn’t all that different from the one seen by ancestors who had followed the Tamsui River to fish, hunt, and farm 4,000 years ago, and the same as that seen by the Spaniards who followed the river upstream one night and discovered the Ketagalan tribe 330 years ago. The station and newly completed MRT tracks destroyed every sliver of imagination. The track built at the turn of the twentieth century ran parallel to a long stretch of red brick sidewalk. As a pedestrian, you’d fought to control your urge to wave at a train as you watched it go by, envious of the passengers inside, as if they were embarking on a long journey. When there were no trains, the silent tracks seemed especially friendly, for you could cross them or lie down on them anytime you wished. The broad, even fields on the far side of the tracks were not much different from those the Tongan people saw 120 years ago, when they were defeated in skirmishes in the wild. The river was out of sight, but you knew that it was nearby and you could follow it to the ocean, which made you long for faraway places.

You had no idea when the incessant longing for faraway places, the desire to go on a long trip, to fly far and high, first came to you. In fact, you’d been off the island less than a month altogether, like an island savage or an ocean pirate. For many years you had actually found life bearable only by regularly imagining some part of the city, some section of a certain road, or some street scene as some other city, one you either had or had not visited. It was like so many men who, regardless of how they feel about their wives—good or bad—have to imagine them as another woman before they can perform in bed.

You never tried to deal with this feeling, nor did you dare mention it to anyone, especially since there were always people who wanted to know whether or not you loved this place, even wanted you to hurry up and leave if you didn’t.

“If you want to leave, leave. Go back to where you came from”—as if you all had a place just waiting for you to return to, a ready-made place to live, but you kept hanging around, to your shame.

*No need to go ashore, no need to shave your head, no need to change your clothing style; sending tribute and being a royal subject will suffice.

Hideo turned his steps toward the bridge at Shijo where he had first met “Chieko’s Naeko” or “Naeko’s Chieko,” but it was hot under the noonday sun. He felt like strolling across the bridge at Shijo, so that was what he did. Leaning against the rail at the end of the bridge, he closed his eyes. He listened, not for the echoes of the crowds or the trains, but for the almost imperceptible sound of the flow of the river.²⁵

Unlike Chieko, you stood on Shijō Bridge in the wind and cold, which, according to the digital display on a nearby building, was 4° Celsius. You were looking down on lovers along the Kamo River who were immune to the cold and seemed to never leave.

The only difficult decision was where to take your afternoon tea—Fauchon, in the basement level of Takashimaya, or Rakushō, by the entrance to Kōdaiji Temple. The afternoon tea at Fauchon—a scone and a cup of house blend coffee or black tea—cost 500 yen, a price that had remained the same for years, whether the value of the yen appreciated dramatically or dropped precipitously. You deeply missed the seats, so few that there was usually a long line. You’d often see neatly dressed old couples, in their seventies at least, taking their meals solemnly, as if conducting a ritual of sorts. They talked in whispers and did not look or act like the average Japanese. You were pretty sure they were probably Deng Xiaoping’s classmates when he studied in France.

But you missed the waramochi at Rakushō even more, so you made your way to Gion. A traveling monk asking for alms stood motionless at one end of the bridge. You weren’t sure if he was the same one you’d seen before. He wore the same summer attire. You never gave him anything, not ever.

Minamiza Theater was still showing a movie by Bandou Tamazaburō, so there was no point in going. The green light was blinking when you suddenly decided to cross the street to look at Shirakawa-minami-dōri, where flagstones were being laid the last time you were there. Shirakawa-minami-dōri parallels Shijo; you and your daughter walked down it that time you followed a geisha on her rounds. The Shiri-kawa flowed past the back doors of the houses, which, if it had been Taiwan, would have been the perfect place to dump trash and dirty water. Koi lived in this stream, which was not quite two meters wide and less than half a meter deep, with willow and weeping cherry trees flanking the banks, toward which shop owners oriented their view, raising or lowering their bamboo curtains based on the intensity of the sun. You told your daughter that southern China was just like that. When had you ever been in southern China?

The flagstone road was finished. If you hadn’t seen the construction with your own eyes, you’d have thought that the street, like the Kiyomizu Sannen-zaka or Ninen-zaka in Higashiyama, was also 100 years old. You sent A a picture you’d taken with your daughter on one of the small bridges at Shiri-kawa, as a belated response to the Christmas card she’d sent you a few years earlier.

Like so many people who vowed never to part and to remain single, you and A never saw each other again after college. The last time had been during the graduation ceremony procession. You were both in the company of family members and boyfriend. A introduced her boyfriend to you, while casting a passing glance at the man next to you. You didn’t know if she had been thinking the same thing—so, someone like that is what you left for.

When you checked your luggage, the hotel manager told you that the flowering season might be delayed a week because it had been unusually cold that year. No wonder the flagstone path was deserted and the charcoal gray branches of the weeping cherries and willows looked so lifeless. Even so, community shops had all contributed lanterns and vats of liquor; peach red and willow green bunting had been hung at an angle on utility poles, while electric lamps had been placed at just the right angle under older, bigger weeping cherry trees.

You had no idea what A was thinking. She hadn’t been back to Taiwan for two decades, but she studied Taiwan. This time she had to make a trip to Japan for a paper she was working on, and when she heard that you were coming here, she had someone send you a fax with the simple request to reserve a hotel room; ideally, you’d share a room and sleep feet to feet, just like in high school. The rest would have to wait until you saw each other.

Regret set in as soon as you stepped on Tatsumi Bridge on the way to Kyomoto-machi. The street lamps were turned on earlier than usual because of the dark, cold weather, and in that light, the smooth surface of the water was mirror clear, showing the fish suspended motionlessly. If your daughter, who loved fish, had been there, she’d have taken out the bread she’d saved from breakfast to feed them. You recalled the first time you’d brought her here. She’d just learned to talk and knew nothing about fish, but when she saw them fighting over food, she gestured anxiously and shouted, “Fish, bai-bai fight!” Bai-bai—“don’t”—had been the only Taiwanese phrase her father had taught her that she still remembered. Told to wash her face? “Bai-bai.” Asked to give something she liked to others? “Bai-bai.” Time to go to bed? “Bai-bai.” Now she was about to graduate from primary school. Over the years, she’d become friendly with the big koi in the Rakushō garden. This time she’d asked you to touch the one she called Japanese flag, a koi that was white all over, except for a big round red dot on its head. She’d noticed that it was always slow to get to the food, so she’d push the other fish away with one hand and feed this one with the other; it never swam away from her.

On several occasions, you sat inside drinking coffee and watched her through the window as she squatted by the pond, so preoccupied with feeding the fish that she tilted toward the water until all you could see was her little fanny in floral underpants sticking up into the air.

Unconsciously you quickened your steps and decided to take a shortcut, as if you’d be able to see your five-year-old daughter squatting by the pond feeding and touching the fish, so long as you reached Rakushō before dark.

You took the stairs up to the Yasaka Shrine; it was dark, gloomy, and deserted. The dense trees swayed like ocean waves. Reminding yourself that you weren’t in Taiwan anymore, you walked unworried past the trees, not forgetting to pay a hurried tribute before the shrine, tossing a coin and clapping your hands. You put your palms together and closed your eyes, praying for the deities to wake up and listen to your wish that this trip not turn into a disaster.

The inclining sun of the peaceful spring shone on the dull, weatherworn lettering of the sign, making it look all the more forlorn. The thick cotton shop-door curtain was faded white, with heavy threads dangling from it.

“Even the red weeping cherries at Heian Shrine have times when they are lonely, subdued by this kind of feeling.” Chieko hurried away.

Except for her usual rashness, you simply couldn’t fathom what A might be thinking. The last time you’d heard from her was when she’d sent a Western-style wedding announcement, informing you that she and so-and-so (you tried to come up with a plausible Chinese name from the romanized spelling) would be married in a certain church in such-and-such county in the state of New Jersey on such-and-such date. It would be the first time A had lived with someone legally. You weren’t even sure if she was still married now, but of course this had nothing to do with the looming sense of disaster.

If not, what was it then? You finished your coffee before it turned cold, but you couldn’t stop yawning. With the trouble you’d had to go through early that morning, the three-hour flight, and the evening chill, plus your low blood pressure, you knew how you must look without checking the mirror. Tiny lines created by icy winds spread out like cracks on ice over a porcelain face that usually did so well with cosmetics. Your hair was fuzzy and coarse, there were dark circles under your eyes, and your lips were either ashen or turning purple. You no longer had the energy for frenzied activity; now you required a full nine hours of sleep and took three kinds of vitamins plus deep-sea fish oil and beta-carotene. Afraid that people would detect a salty odor that seemed to deepen by the day, you bathed and washed your hair religiously. You couldn’t guess what A would look like now. She had the perfect body type for putting on weight, and quite a few pounds of flesh could hang on that 5’6” frame, with its broad shoulders, compounded by twenty years of American dietary habits.

You could no longer travel the way you had at seventeen, going off with her for a few days, sometimes not taking a thing, not even toilet articles, along. You would agree to meet at the east or west bus station, empty-handed except for a collection of poetry or a copy of Schopenhauer, which you didn’t really understand. What little traveling money you had was tucked inside the back pocket of your jeans. Strange that you didn’t seem to need to wash your face or brush your teeth, or, for that matter, bathe. When you woke up, you were hale and hearty, eyes bright, mouth fresh. And you never gained weight, no matter what or how much you ate.

That was why you hesitated over accommodating A’s request to share a double room. Spending several nights with her in a Japanese business hotel room that was barely big enough to turn around in was virtually unimaginable. Nor could you face the salty odor and hair that would surely linger in the bathroom, or tolerate the body odor you were sure A would have acquired by now. You’d sleep with your back to her and even in your sleep you’d have to be careful—no talking in your sleep, no wild dreams. Your purrlike snores probably had not gotten any louder, but now they were probably more like a machine with a screw loose and in need of repair, a sort of metallic noise.

You had given up on ever seeing A again one day. After going abroad, whether she was studying or working, she seemed confined to small towns like those visited by Allison in Peyton Place. During the early years, she’d sent you maple leaves, beautiful leaves the color of red peppers or of red roses, and so big she’d mailed them in large manila envelopes, so big, in fact, they actually disappointed you, because they were so different from those you’d created in your imagination. But you put them away carefully, then generously gave them to your daughter when her primary school class collected specimens. Ten years, and the brightness and color hadn’t faded a bit, as if they were plastic or silk. Like you, your daughter was amazed that leaves could be so big, big enough to cover her face; they were nothing like the takao kaede maple leaves she’d collected here over several autumns, or the ones from those fragrant maples she found on the island.

Beneath the specimen, your daughter wrote in uneven characters that made it look as if the writer had some sort of handicap: “Fragrance maple, Chinese witch hazel …”

You were filled with regret. Why had you chosen to meet with A rather than spend the precious holiday with your daughter?

The road was rather long. They avoided the trains, taking the more distant route around to Nanzenji Temple Road, passing behind Chianji Temple. Then they passed through the rear of Maruyama Park, walking the old narrow path to Kiyomizu Temple. At that moment, the sky was covered in a spring sunset.²⁶

When you paid your bill, the owners, two sisters, reminded you to put on a coat, for it was quite cold out. They were so friendly you wondered if they remembered you. You didn’t get a chance to touch “Japanese flag” for your daughter, since the door and windows were all closed and heavily draped. The Fuminosuke Teahouse across the way had already lit their big black lanterns. A few customers who didn’t mind the cold were lined up outside. You’d never been there, maybe because every time you walked by the place you had thoughts of your five-year-old daughter squatting by Rakushō Pond to feed the fish, so engrossed that her little fanny stuck up in the air, even though she was always right beside you when your thoughts were of her.

You decided to take the opposite route from Shinichi and Chieko, turning left out of the lane by Saigyōan and Kikukei Pavilion and cutting across the front of Higashiō Temple to go into Maruyama Park. That’s where most of the cats were.

Unlike your daughter, on your first visit you were surprised to find that they had brazenly, in your view, used the same name, Maruyama (Yuanshan), for the park. She, on the other hand, had gone on a kindergarten outing to the Yuanshan (Maruyama) River Park and come home to ask why we had given it a Japanese name. Stumped, you couldn’t answer, while your husband teased her about forgetting her own traditions.

The buds were still hard on the hundred-year-old weeping cherry in the center of the park, so, reluctant to leave, you bought a hot drink to warm yourself, like all those hardy night visitors.

The weeping cherry was like a weeping willow before buds appeared. Floodlights had been set up, just waiting for the tree to awaken. One spring you and your daughter had enjoyed a picnic lunch under the cherry trees near sculptures of Sakamoto Ryōma and Nakao Shintarō. From where you sat at a distance, you could see the hundred-year-old weeping cherry. Under the floodlights, it seemed to float high in the sky, like a freeze-frame shot of fireworks or one of those beautiful yet lethal jellyfish. You didn’t dare let your eyes linger too long for fear that the tree might have acquired supernatural powers that could suck out your soul.

As you ate and drank, you told your daughter the story of Sakamoto Ryōma and Nakao Shintarō. During the daylight hours, you had followed Ryōma’s route through the capital city, visiting places like the teahouse at the alley entrance to Kiyomizu-zaka, near Sannen-zaka, where Ryōma and the late Tokugawa patriots had held their secret meetings. It sat atop one of the thirty-six peaks of the Higashi-yama Range, where they could see the Nijo gate of the shogun castle open, which meant that gendarmes were coming to arrest them, and that gave them time to jump through windows and flee. You walked by Sanjōgawara-machi, where a stele on the roadside indicated that was where Sakamoto Ryōma and Nakao Shintarō met their tragic ends. Ryōma’s tomb was not far from the upper hill of Ryōzen Kannon in Ninenzaka, where your daughter once found a giant cocoon like that of a mosura. It left such an indelible impression on her that later, whenever you walked by Sannen-zaka or Ninenzaka, she’d rush you over to Ryōma’s tomb to see if she could find another cocoon, since you had lingered, unwilling to leave, standing by the entrance of Ninen-zaka, the old residence of Takehisa Yumeiji, where you could gaze down at the city scene and market site below.

In fact, you could not have had any special feelings toward Sakamoto Ryōma. You recalled the day before you were scheduled to return to the island, which was then embroiled in ugly political struggles, and that prompted you to tell your daughter about Saigō Takamori, a political adversary of the Meiji Emperor, each of whom treated the other with respect. That was also how the Kangxi Emperor viewed Koxinga: an official of the Ming, neither a rebel nor a traitorous official of his own.

The primitive aborigines knew nothing about farming, shooting down flying creatures and hunting those on the ground to provide for themselves and for their offspring. They worshiped totems.²⁷

In the beginning, here is how the Spaniards and Dutch described Taipei: weeds long, air foul, many residents are sick.

Later, Yu Yonghe, who came for the sulfur, described Taipei in his A Record of Travels in Baihai as follows: no place for humans. But that was 1697, and you really couldn’t blame the city. During the same period, one could ride an oxcart through the Jiayi-Tainan Plain and feel as if they were traveling underground (how wonderful!).

Toward the end of the Kangxi reign, Lan Dingyuan,²⁸ who led an army to put down the Zhu Yigui rebellion, said that the Taiwanese are habitually rebellious; you quell them but they rise up again.

Li Hongzhang:³⁰ the birds don’t sing, the flowers have no fragrance, the men are ruthless, the women are faithless.

“Chieko, let’s sell off this shop and move to Xizhen, what do you say? Or else we could find a small, quiet house near Nanzenji or Okazaki, and the two of us can think up designs for kimono cloth and obis, how does that sound?”

You recalled the unfinished trip you’d made the day after the big election. You reached Yuanshan, but saw passageways everywhere, in the air, on the ground, and you were lost among them, not knowing how to locate the route you’d taken hundreds of times at seventeen. Meiji Bridge—later you learned that’s what it was called. The brass lamps from the Meiji Bridge had been purchased during a round of reconstruction by Li Meishu, who installed them in a Buddhist temple in Sanxia. The handsome, straight, and even bridge, now overshadowed by a new one, was waiting to be demolished. The new rulers, who had criticized the ancien régime as an occupying power, had been in office four years, and the way they behaved was exactly like an occupying power. They acted as if they were just staying for a while and could pick up and leave at any moment; otherwise, why had they taken down the two rows of fragrant maples that had been there before any of you living now had appeared on the scene? No wonder you nearly forgot the FORTUNE-TELLER sign that had been faintly visible in the dense verdant shade. It was the first long word you’d learned after mastering the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet in junior high school. You’d made a tiny vow to yourself that you’d have your fortune told one day when you grew up, stubbornly, unquestioningly believing that there would be a mysterious, alluring Gypsy beyond the wall who would unveil the secrets of the universe for you in her crystal ball.

Surprisingly, the children’s amusement park was still there, but the gloomy late autumn air raised the question of whether or not it was in operation. Oh, how you wanted to go inside. If the dragon boat, with its rotten planks, replete with the smell of urine, were still there, you were certain you’d see the five-year-old you, who exposed her underpants as she bent over to touch the water. You wondered if your daughter, who had been to Disneyland countless times, would accompany you here, the paradise of your childhood when you were her age. You tried to tell her that it had been just as much fun as Disneyland. In fact, you did more than that; you took her along on your search for your childhood village. It was in a northern suburb, not far. Ultimately, as you stood amid rows of remodeled public housing, you had to use the distant mountains to position yourself before you could locate the likely site of your old home—now flower beds outside a convenience store. You took your daughter to the hills where you’d run wild and celebrated the joys of childhood, only to find, to your surprise, that the hills had been swallowed up by five or six ugly apartment buildings. What remained was a tiny hilltop you could easily walk across. Standing on the path, you pointed to a culvert under the highway and told your daughter that was where you’d buried your dog. You tried your best to reconstruct that autumn day: the fields submerged in arista weeds, lonely smoke rising up from fires the farmers lit to burn the weeds, and your inconsolable mood. Strange how dogs all seem to die in the autumn.

You and your playmates had once baked sweet potatoes you’d stolen from the farmers after the harvest. Untiringly, you took turns running back to the village to steal matches from home so you could start a fire. But you were so bad at it that after using up five or six boxes of Freedom matches, you only managed to burn a small pile of chaff, while the bright red sweet potatoes lay unscathed at the bottom of the pit. Left with nothing to do on such a long and boring day, you decided to walk aimlessly away from the village. The more you walked, the larger the airplanes flying overhead became. Overcome with excitement, you speculated that an airport must lie at the far end of the field, so you agreed to walk over there. If you actually made it to the area’s one and only airport, it would be like going abroad. Just what did it mean to go abroad? It seemed to you to mean that an airport was a better shortcut than the tunnel you were constantly planning to dig all the way down to America.

You walked and you walked, and pretty soon, none of you felt like talking anymore; you hadn’t expected it to be so far. You passed a huge manure pit, then you walked by a farmhouse with a howling dog, even reached a gourd trellis, where you were forced, like tightrope walkers, to cross a bridge made of a single rotting log. If not for the encouragement lent by airplanes flying just above your heads, you’d have given up. When the youngest tagalong started to sob and complain, you wouldn’t let him cry, afraid that would shatter your morale. But the few sobs attracted some kids a ways off. One of them turned out to be a classmate who sat in the second-to-last row, someone with whom you’d never exchanged a word. Hers was the godforsaken Beishihu Route—Oh, no, had you actually come all the way to Beishihu?

Your classmate’s family operated brick kilns. Row after row of crab red or grayish green bricks, some fired, some not, stood in a broad open area, the perfect place for a fight. So you divided into two “nations,” the Beishihu Nation and the Loyalty New Village Nation. The two sides fought long and hard, until it turned dark and the Beishihu Nation was called home for dinner by angry parents.

When you returned to your village, you all told your parents and the older kids the same story: you’d walked all the way to the airport. You described the giant monsters you saw there, claiming you’d have gone abroad if the Keelung River hadn’t blocked your way. I mean it, we were that close, a matter of inches, you repeated emphatically, guessing that they probably didn’t believe you.

You wouldn’t see the name Beishihu again until thirty years later, when you were helping your daughter with her third-grade field report. Beishihu was associated with building materials for Taihoku (Taipei) at the end of the Qing dynasty. Some said the stones were mined at Beishihu Hill in Dazhi, that the bricks came from kilns in Beishihu and Fangliaozhuang, and that the lime was produced by lime kilns at Hegoutou in Dataocheng. But another version had it that the stone came from Anshan rocks in Qili’an, the bricks were bought in Amoy, and the mortar was Dutch clay. The latter was made of glutinous rice steamed with brown sugar and lime, and resembled the material used to build the Chikan Fortress and other Dutch sites on the island.

The Japanese were no different from the Manchu Qing court; if it wasn’t “perhaps we should level the place,” it was “sell Taiwan for a billion dollars.” They disassembled the bricks and tiles laboriously fired in Beishihu and built three-lane streets, along which were planted nightshade trees, which were popular all over the island, and betel palms and coconut trees to give them a southern flavor, 150 of them on Aiguo East Road and 100 on Xinyi Road.

Half a century later, the nightshades had become a green wall, the demarcation line where your all-girls high school made peace with one of the all-boys high schools. You and A often arranged to meet boys there. The wide safety island was paved with red bricks; white wrought-iron benches encircled the tree trunks, and the streetlights, no matter how bright, could not penetrate the dense shadows from the nightshade trees, making it a convenient place for the boys to smoke cigarettes, and for you to evade the nosy military education teacher who was always following you. Most of the time the boys brought books or the latest copy of their school publication, or vice versa. With much greater enthusiasm than you invested in your textbooks, you recited and memorized the difficult and obscure lines, savoring them as if relishing candy. When you bade one another good-bye, you never forgot to agree on an end-of-the-month outing between your class and theirs.

Back then there were few cars, so there was no need to worry that headlights would expose the boy who held you in a passionate embrace and explored your body at night. You cooperated without reciprocating, hoping he’d quickly finish what he was doing and return to normal, so you could go back to the evening study hall, where you’d finish memorizing a history lesson for the next day’s exam. His sweat and body odor were as pungent as the nightshade trees, which sent your thoughts wandering to unknown places. The boy would straighten your clothes and pick up your book bag with a sparkle in his eyes. A would definitely hear about this, and you felt reassured.

Chieko suffered a tremendous blow. She was so fond of going to the village, so fond of looking up at the pine-covered mountains. Maybe it was a summons from her father’s spirit. The girl from the mountain village told her she had a twin sister. Is it possible that her biological father was worrying so much about the abandoned twin daughter, Chieko, that a misstep had caused him to fall from the fir tree?

The Japanese who had originally thought of selling Taiwan for a billion dollars not only covered Kitayamasugi with trees but also tried to grow them all over the southern island. They didn’t just plant annual flowers and plants; with an unworried certainty, they put down saplings that would take a century to show any resemblance to trees. Strange how they seemed not to have planned to simply eat and run.

Eat and run. That reminded you of the dissident who had been exiled for thirty years because of his resistance against the totalitarian government. That was then, this is now. Once he became the county head, reminiscent of others before him, he converted the island’s last piece of wetland into a polluting industrial site that consumed tremendous amounts of energy.

How was he any different from the foreign power he’d criticized and hoped to overthrow? How else would he have dared do what he did? When you walked by your green wall one day you discovered—oh my god—the century-old nightshade trees had disappeared overnight, all for the ostensibly justifiable reason of widening the street. You were so grief-stricken, so distressed, you felt as if you’d lost your best friend.

It became virtually impossible to recount to your daughter the traces of your lives in this city: the village you’d lived in; the spot where you’d buried the dog; the studio where you’d learned to dance; the memory-filled suburban movie theaters, with their double features; the site where you and her father had had your first date; you and your best friend’s favorite coffee shop; the bookstores you’d frequented as a student; the house you’d rented when you and her father were first married…. Even the two kindergartens (same location, different ownership) where she’d been enrolled not so long ago had disappeared (it was now a small restaurant called Home of the Geese).

It was getting really cold, so you went back to the hotel to check in, deciding to take a single room for the time being. When A arrived, you two could move to a double room or she could get a single for herself.

This simple decision instantly eradicated your hesitation and anxiety over the past few days. As soon as you put your luggage in the room, you felt the pangs of hunger.

So, following your old habits, you first went to pray, palms together, at Nishiki tenman Temple in Shin-kyōgoku-dōri. Lanterns the size of giant vats hung all around the temple, and you had no idea what deity they worshipped here. Most of the stores on Nishiki-koji, across from the temple, were closed. Shopkeepers at the few fish stores that still had lights on were busy washing the countertops and corridors, but yelled out when they saw you walk by, “Irasshai, irasshai, welcome.”

Clutching your money tightly and quickening your pace, you made yourself out to be someone in a hurry, a professional woman hurrying home to make dinner after a day’s work at the office. You walked all the way to a small shop in Takeda City, where you bought two pairs of thick, brand-name socks that were no longer fashionable. It was colder than usual, so a kerosene heater warmed the shop, which was shrouded in the aroma of fish soup. The owner’s school-age granddaughter was crowded into the space by the cash register so she could watch TV while doing her homework. The sight, of course, reminded you of your daughter.

The rear section of the Nishiki Market was already quiet and deserted, so you were forced to cross the Yanagibaba-dōri to return to Shijō-dōri and, out of all the places to eat, you picked Doutor Café across the street, where you normally ate your breakfast.

You ordered a cup of the day’s special coffee and a kōgen hot dog sandwich. Since the window seats were taken, you sat at the large round table inside. The heat and cigarette smoke quickened your heartbeat, but that could also have been caused by the thought that you might see your daughter’s back as she bent over her homework.

If she came when school was in session, she had to bring her schoolwork in order to keep up. And since there was so little space in the hotel room, she often came here to do her homework at the large round table. At first you helped with her arithmetic, but you were out of your element when she reached third grade. The two of you speaking a different language did not draw the attention of other people at the table, or maybe it just didn’t register on their faces. They all wore an expression that said they’d seen enough strange things not to be bothered. Too many people, too little space; they fought crowds on commuter trains, in department stores, and in coffee shops. Constantly thrown into situations where interpersonal space was limited beyond the range of tolerance, they developed an indifferent, expressionless mask, which they donned with their clothes and hat when they left the house. Otherwise, how could they survive?

But that’s how you liked it: everyone ignoring everyone else. Probably there were mental patients among them, but you felt perfectly safe. With skill and tact, you sized up an immaculately dressed middle-aged man, two Chanel-clad young women who were heavy smokers, and a handsome young professional who could have been Takeshi Kaneshiro’s brother.³¹ Taking a sip of the hot coffee, you said to yourself, for some strange reason, “Tadaima, I’m back.”

*There were King Arthur, who was as tall as a tree, a colorful Egyptian bas relief, giant sculptures of kings, and a portrait of the real Sphinx. It was like a dream world.—Freud

Your kind of weather has lush and pungent greenery, azure skies, and blinding sunlight, but now you were invariably in a room chilled by air conditioners, or in a car, or inside a coffee shop, or in a room by a window, and that cost you your sense of reality, causing you to mistakenly assume that the temperature outside was the same as inside—cold. That and the striking contrast between light and shadow produced the illusion that you were in a country you’d wanted to visit or one you’d visited before.

For instance, when you took the MRT, which you’d once vowed never to take, you sat in a three-story-high train that lopped off the sight of most of the disgustingly ugly, old, five-story apartment buildings, and seemed to have returned to an age when there were only single-story houses. A large chunk of the sky was exposed, creating a sense of vastness and reminding you, for the first time in years, that from the beginning, this was an oceanic country, and that the nearby ocean, there at the edge of the sky, fired your imagination. Sometimes the train cut across the midsection of small hills on the edge of the basin. If you succeeded in remaining unperturbed by the junkyards or potter’s fields below and concentrated on the cassia forest swaying in the sunlight, then you were reminded of a small Mediterranean island in late autumn, carpeted with olive trees. Sometimes the train stopped at a station that rose above the mansion of an ousted official who refused to move. If you tried your best to ignore the dillenia grove, with its equatorial rain forest flavor, the arhat pines, standing in contrast with the sea-blue sky, would surely recall for you and many people memories of camping on the beach at Jinshan. But buildings that were a dozen or more stories tall obstructed your view of the sky. On dark, gloomy days, when the train slithered between colorless tall buildings and squat illegal structures, trumpet music would sound from the bottom of your heart (and, you believed, others’ hearts as well). It was the background music from Annie Hall, “Sleepy Lagoon,” where Woody Allen reminisces about his childhood days, living under a roller coaster. The mood of the melody contradicts its lyrics, which are about an equatorial moon, a sleepy coral reef, and you … you wondered why they’d picked a song about a tropical island.

Experiences like this were becoming increasingly rare. Except for the one route that was indispensable in your daily life, you had become reluctant to roam, afraid of discovering more things like the disappearance of a line of century-old nightshade trees, afraid to face the overnight disappearance of old 30-foot maple trees on which sparrows and emerald eyes perched the year round. The latter had been replaced by a gigantic billboard, selling upscale housing at 100,000 NT a square foot. Directly across from it, in Lane 243, Jinhua Street, a row of 50-year-old eucalyptus trees had been taken down by his Excellency the Mayor, who never stopped crowing about how much he loved this island and this city. Even more ironic was that the place was immediately turned into a small community park with tiny trees.

Since you were no longer willing to walk down unfamiliar streets and alleyways, the routes available to you were getting scarcer.

You walked past 145 Jinjiang Street, behind Taiwan First Bank on Roosevelt Road; a sign on the wooden gate proclaimed in couplet style: GOVERNMENT PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING. For the very first time, you wished that this administration would maintain its low efficiency and have no time to deal with public property, so that the birds and lush, tall camphor and coconut trees could continue to occupy the space. There were other pretty ruins like that: Nos. 1 and 7 of Lane 22, Pucheng Street (their mutual neighbor, No. 3, was used as book storage for the National Assembly, but in essence it was no different from a ruin); across from the Huamao Hotel in Alley 30, Lane 83, Section 1 of Zhongshan North Road was a place where fragrant cedar, bougainvillea, grannylike mango trees … stood; on Changchun Road, sparrow banyan trees spilled over the fence of No. 249, where the door was guarded by mulberry and eucalyptus. No. 249’s neighbors, 251 and 253, were occupied; yellow gourd flowers were blooming at No. 255. Then there was the place kitty-corner from No. 18, Lane 63 of Linqi Street, where a paper mulberry, a banyan, and a breadfruit tree formed a triangle, while an arhat pine cowered in the corner, and you could imagine the autumnal feelings of the person, a onetime resident of South Asia, no doubt, who had planted the trees.

Then there was a house, one corner of which was an illegal construction of long standing—No. 2, Lane 140, Section 3 of Roosevelt Road. Another one, overrun by feral cats, was No. 3, Lane 26 of Taishun Street, where the calicoes and tabbies would come out and let you feed them, while little black kittens sat in the dark like owls. Some houses had collapsed walls, and it was easy to spot the materials and construction style of Showa-era houses, like No. 244, Section 1 of Heping East Road and Nos. 143 and 145, Chaozhou Street. There was also an entire lane that hadn’t changed in decades and served as a moat to curb the Nationalist government’s propaganda apparatus, such as the Central Broadcasting Company or Central TV; that was Lane 212, Section 1 of Jianguo South Road, where a family of dogs lived in No. 59. The mommy dog was alert but timid, a typical mutt, but the amiable smiles of the five tan-and-white pups showed that their daddy had Akita blood (no hidden meaning in this passage). A host of ghosts lived at No. 49, a family at No. 53, a yard full of kids at No. 37. The house beyond that was taken by master squatters, who had no house number and no mailbox. Were they humans or fox spirits? The neatly trimmed gardenias, pomeloes, loquats, and tallow trees in the yard told you that the person who planted them must have been a fox spirit from a province other than Taiwan.

There were also houses that had deteriorated so badly they had largely turned to dust and been blown away by the wind, leaving a yard, a fence, and a door frame. On the doors were miniature forests of horsetail in colors somewhere between gray and green, a plant that had seen the existence of dinosaurs. One such house was located at No. 7, Lane 92 of Taiwan Normal University Road, directly across from Guzhuang Park.

To be sure, some places were well maintained by their occupants, who could have been officials or servants, or their descendants. One example was the former residence of Chiang Junior, located at No. 20, Section 1 of Chang’an East Road, facing the rear entrance of the Presbyterian church, established in 1937 A.D. Japanese indulging in all-night revelry had left the lingering pungent smell of urine at the base of the outside wall. Antitheft barbed wire atop the wall was intertwined with pink coral vines and hemlock at 75, Section 1 of Hangzhou South Road; the male head of a family, having neither been killed nor turned up missing, returned a year after the war ended and planted a giant breadfruit tree at No. 9, Lane 61 of Linqi Street; another planting by a head of household was of South Pacific firs at No. 1, Lane 44 of Linqi Street; yet another was by a South Pacific returnee who chose to plant Burmese gardenias at No. 2–1, Lane 3 of Tai’an Street; there was also a family whose status was impossible to guess; No. 3, Lane 2 on the same street spread out until it was the size of a row of apartment buildings; parallel to that sprawling house was No. 1, Lane 6 of Tongshan Street, with banana shrubs and mangoes stretching over the fence, reminiscent of your paternal grandfather’s house. But more like his house ought to be the one at No. 11, Lane 24 of Pucheng Street. Many people’s old photo albums would have a faded black-and-white photograph in which, with azaleas and longan trees on a small patch of cement as a background, a child sits on a tricycle with younger siblings behind. There were also Nos. 23, 7, and 1 in Lane 264 of Ruian Street, which should have been a better location for the imposing mansion on Roosevelt Road that was searched by the female protagonist in Dodder Flower, a Guolian Film Corporation movie you saw as a girl, one that was based on Qiong Yao’s novel.³² If not, the only other possible places would be No. 10, Lane 11 of Qingtian Street or No. 4, Lane 9 or No. 1, across from it.

Some residents carefully maintained the original looks of the houses, opting not to cement up the ox-eye openings in the courtyard walls or the skylights, such as Nos. 7 and 9 in Lane 91, Section 2 of Ren’ai Road; No. 4 in Lane 62, Section 2 of Ji’nan Road; and No. 71, Alley 1, Lane 24, Section 3 of Ren’ai Road. The owners even set down strict rules about trees; they planted only cherries, arhat pines, and South Pacific firs, while preventing the growth of a variety of mulberries and sparrow banyans, whose seeds can sprout anywhere and thrive once they are dropped by birds. Such an immaculate house was located at No. 34, Lane 97, Section 1 of Xinsheng South Road, where fired tiles and a black fir wall served as backdrop for an arhat pine, which was close to a completed flower arrangement. It resembled the tradesman’s house you were used to seeing on Higashiyama Gojo. If it had been a bit bigger, it could have served as a small community museum, like the salt museum in Shinano Ō-machi.

It didn’t matter whether or not they cemented the openings in the wall, planted varieties of mulberries, or picked and ate the berries in the yard—all these families had one thing in common: on their wooden gates, painted or unpainted, written in chalk, were the names of newspapers: Lian (United Daily News), Yang (Central Daily News), Lian-Yang, Lian-Guo (China Daily News), or Guo-Min (Minsheng Daily). You would never see Zi (Zili—Independent News or Ziyou—Liberty Times), nor Tai (Taiwan Times, Taiwan Daily). No exceptions, up or down the alley, and it was reminiscent of the Ali Baba story, where the forty thieves marked people’s doors to determine whether or not to kill the residents inside one of these days.

One of these days, the houses in these lanes and alleys would be returned, at a high efficiency rate, to the new administration, which also loved Taiwan, to build, with plenty of corners cut, a dormitory for the Postal Administration or for the Customs Office or for professors at such-and-such university, or residences for government officials…. By then, except for Lane 52 of Wenzhou Street, any other street you’d trod would have disappeared, and you’d have no place to walk, no memory to recall. And it didn’t end there. You recalled something by a writer with the same background as yours: “It turns out that you cannot call a place your hometown if none of your relatives has died there.” You weren’t as picky as that; you just wanted to ask humbly and deferentially: wouldn’t a city, no matter what it’s called (usually something related to prosperity, progress, or, occasionally, hope and happiness), be in essence a city of strangers if it had no intention of retaining the traces of people who had lived there? Why would anyone want to cherish, treasure, maintain, and identify with an unfamiliar city?

The Daimonji on Niyoigatake Peak on Higashiyama is the best known, but there were actually five mountains where fires were lighted. The “Left Daimonji” on Okitayama near Kinkakuji, the “Myoho” on Mount Matsugasaki, the “Funagata” on Akimiyama in Nishigamo, and the “Toriigata” on a mountain in Kamisaga. In all, five “sending fires” were lighted, bonfires to direct the spirits of the dead back to the netherworld. For the forty minutes of the events, all the neon lighting and advertising in the city was turned off.

Chieko could sense the color of early autumn in the sending fires and the glow of the night sky.

When you woke up, the caws of crows flapping their wings in the mansion gave you the feeling that you were in an ancient temple deep in the mountains. You could gaze at far-off Higashi-yama through your window. You would not need to cool off at Kamo-gawa if you came in August. At night you could sip cold sake by the window and watch the bonfire on Daimon-ji to send off the spirits.

The water boiled, so you made a cup of green tea using the Uji tea bag provided by the hotel. You turned on the TV, from which emerged that language you did not understand, but which, mixed with the fragrance of the tea, comprised part of the smells in your deep memory. Sometimes there were also the mixed fragrances of all the brand-name perfumes in a department store; sometimes there was the cheerless aroma, devoid of the smell of food, from the tea and Kyoto incense lit at an old fruit shop; sometimes there were the smells, in closed spaces like a train or a coffee shop, of bath soap, body lotion, and eau de cologne on men and women obsessed with cleanliness, or simply air freshener in rooms with central air…. Smells lingered above the city, not dissipating, and maybe the indispensable odor of crows should be added, all of which would, before you died, fill you with nostalgia over these familiar smells.

You were standing at Tanba-ya at the entrance to Tera-machi-dōri to the left of Otabisho, unsure of which kind of rich mochi to buy—those covered in ogarumame and rolled in yellow bean powder, or the green ones with ogarumame filling. In the past you would buy a box of six, split them with your daughter, and eat as you walked to wherever you were going: Fumishi-inari taisha, Shichijo keihan, the entrance to Gion’s Nawate-dōri … since your daughter was not with you, you probably couldn’t finish a box by yourself, so you decided to wait until A arrived, then split a box with her.

Spotting the entrance to Fuyamachi-dōri, you decided to cross the street to buy some coffee spoons and forks at Alba, counting up all the people who had praised your crescent-shaped utensils in the past. You’d also finally made up your mind to buy the Italian Taitu platter with its painted leaves from all kinds of deciduous trees in autumn. The style was the same as that on the little plates used for handmade rice cakes by the owner of Saloon Ko-hi-kan, located at the alley entrance to the old residence at Shiganaoya. You’d looked at it for years, but it had always been too pricey for you. But then, when you returned to the island, where autumns were rare, those autumnal leaves always appeared before your eyes in all their beauty.

The shop clerk, who could tell you were a foreigner when you spoke, packed the platter with extra care to make sure it wouldn’t break during the flight home. You hadn’t been this happy in a long time. With these everlasting leaves from green hard oaks, chestnuts, mountain elms, oak trees, poplars, alders … you could face many winters back home.

Here is how winters on the island have been described: in the last month the winter sweets bloom, the tea flowers spread, daffodils sprout, plum buds appear, camellias blossom, and snowflakes fall.

But the reality was: the day after the gubernatorial and mayoral election, you were pacing outside the bleak amusement park of your childhood, not sure whether to go in or not, when you spotted a stone stele covered in intertwining banyan roots, climbing figs, and sedge. On it was carved: OLD SITE OF TAIGUCAO. This was where Chen Weiying, the famous Taiwan Confucian scholar, had retired to undergo self-cultivation. The inscription revealed that Chen (1811–1869) was born during the Jiacheng reign of the Qing dynasty, at Gangziqian in Dalongtong. He was widely read in history and well versed in all schools of thought. In the ninth year of the Xianfeng reign he passed the provincial exam, the second highest rung, and later worked as head of the Min County Confucian School and Head of the Grand Secretariat. After returning to Taiwan, he took charge of the Yangshan and Xuehai academies, teaching more than a thousand students. At the age of fifty, he moved to Taigucao, where he lived the life of a recluse. According to legends passed down from the colonial period, Taigucao, surrounded by water and mountains, had taken its name from “mountains quiet as Taigu.” But others said that it was the birthplace of Taiwan’s aborigines. A more reliable explanation would be that during the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns, the place was called Taige Hut, with a large concentration of lepers. Taige in Taiwanese sounds like Taigu. After the death of Chen Weiying, the place fell into disrepair and decline. In 1906, the Japanese cut into the north side of the mountain to build a bridge. Taigucao, being in the way, could not escape the fate of demolition.

Casting a glance at the ghost of Chen Weiying, who stood shoulder to shoulder with you, you read the inscription and were tongue-tied. It was an allegory belonging to all ancient cultures: you lack the knowledge, even the historical knowledge, but live with it happily and in harmony until you gain the knowledge to understand it and, feeling slight remorse (even though you had always liked it), you treat it better; but it will never be the same, never the same as before. Was this a case of middle-aged nostalgia, which all people and all cultures experience? Unwilling to admit that was so, you believed that Chen Weiying shared your view, and believed even more strongly that the Meiji Bridge, buried beneath you in the eternal darkness of the eighteenth level of hell, did too. Over half the sweet gum trees, which had been as old as Chokushi Street, were gone; the beautiful Miyanoshita Road had grown into such a state that it was like countless incurable tumors—ugly, ugly. Mournfully, you avoided the area, but what had died, of course, included part of you.

The same sort of annoying knowledge told you that the original site of the soccer field that had sprung up out of nowhere had been a stadium built in 1923 to welcome the Showa, then still the Crown Prince, on his southern inspection trip. In the early years of the Nationalist government, it was lent to the Seventh Fleet Military Assistance and Advisory Group. On one soccer game night, the mayor-elect described his blueprint for the city’s future, in which the soccer field might be used as the site of a stadium. By then, you, along with many more sweet gum trees, would have to join ranks with Chen Weiying.

Cities are bases for banks and prostitution, strewn with weedlike skyscrapers. That is what Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the Imperial Hotel, once said.

Like someone who’s been abroad for years, you sighed as you wondered why you could not recall what the site occupied by a row of wedding photo studios had been used for. Then you saw that St. Christopher’s was still there, looking like its old self. Vulgar and virtually identical oil paintings for export hung on its wrought-iron fence; as before, winter sunlight streamed through the trees and cast shadows on the paintings, coloring them in such a way that they became an indispensable vista. That had been part of your youthful fantasies: roaming the world to sell your paintings and perform as a sidewalk musician.

The people selling paintings here were all deaf-mutes (it wasn’t until much later that you realized they could simply be sellers of paintings). The good friends who had sworn to roam the world with you, earning a living as street performers, were all abroad now. Some had become virtuous wives and good mothers; others were ensconced in upper-management positions with computer companies. One followed her famous chef husband from state to state, working in Chinese restaurants and living like gypsies. One, like A, never returned, while another came back to Taiwan every summer with children who could not communicate with your daughter or become good friends, as had the older generation, and that disappointed all of you.

You went out for a meal or for afternoon tea, and you talked about your current lives. But you never brought up the past, for that was too much like the nightshade and sweet gum trees, which had been either transplanted or taken down.

So you preferred not to reminisce, not because there were so many new things—new shops, new idols, new scandals, new opportunities to make money, new lovers of so-and-so’s husband, a new dynasty, and new officials. You suspected that, precisely because they could not recall what had existed before, they easily established harmonious relationships with new things, good and bad. But not you. You weren’t even willing to lament how “The Way We Were” had changed or how Eslite Bookstore had become Sesame Wedding. For you, compared to the real past, all these were simply too new, and you wanted nothing to do with them, not to buy a magazine or enjoy a cup of coffee, since that would surely lead to the beginning of something that would soon disappear; otherwise, why would you have offered up so many lamentations wondering how to enter Qingguang Market? A location you vaguely recalled was now overrun by McDonald’s, Giordano, Sanshang qiaofu, Nicai Boutiques, or Wendy’s, 7–11, Michelle Fashions, and Hang Ten. You felt like the Jin dynasty fisherman from Wuling….

Chieko recalled that incident as she walked the lane toward Nonomiya. A notice along the way read, THIS PATH PASSES THROUGH A DEEP BAMBOO THICKET. The sign was not very old, but what once may have been a dark footpath was now bright and open. There was even a vendor in front of the gate who called to Chieko.

The small shrine, however, had not changed. It was described even in the Tale of Genji.

Had not changed was only the beginning. Even more worshippers had come after Ayanomiya, second son of Emperor Akihito, and his wife came to plant trees a few years back. The visitors were all praying for a great marriage, but not you. Across the tracks, there were far fewer people, maybe because it was so cold. You’d seen the NHK weather forecast that morning and learned that the high would only be 5° or 6° Celsius, so the cherry-blossom festival might require an unprecedented one-week postponement. You worried that A, given the shortness of her visit, would not be able to see the cherry blossoms—oh god, you might see her when you got back to the hotel that night. You hoped she wouldn’t lard her speech with English, like so many people who had been out of the country far too long, because that would only increase the tension in your exchanges. You also hoped she wouldn’t be dressed sloppily and attract attention, like most Americans. Of course you couldn’t imagine A in stuffy clothes like a suit or a jacket and silk scarf. No way to know if her hair was long or short. Women of your age normally wore their hair in one of two styles, no matter how much attention they paid to it—short obasan style or long obasan style. God, it truly had been years since you’d last seen each other. A stopped sending pictures after a while. The last one you sent was of you and your daughter on the Shirakawa-Tatsumi-bashi at Gion. You could not help but be afraid that you might sit in different corners of the hotel lobby, glancing at each other for the longest time before exclaiming silently, “My god, have I become as hard to recognize as she is?”

After Bamboo Grove, there were only ordinary residences. In the garden, facing east, stood some oshima cherries, their white peachlike flowers struggling to bloom. Since it was too cold for visitors, the small gift shop near Rakushisha that sold figurines was closed, but the long wooden bench, covered in a red blanket, hadn’t been taken inside. You decided to follow the Kyorai Cemetery road; you recalled that the Seiryōji Festival would feature a kyogen performance on a given Saturday or Sunday in April.

The Kyorai Cemetery was located in a grove of eighty-or ninety-year-old fir trees, where your daughter had once picked mushrooms and wild berries, though you had no idea whether they were poisonous or not. The wild turtledoves were unafraid of humans, making it even harder for your daughter to leave.

The fields by the fir grove were sometimes blanketed by buttery yellow rape flowers, and at times like that, even the nearby peach trees bloomed. Sometimes the farmers would be burning leaves and grass, and the persimmon trees in Rakushisha would have shed their leaves, leaving only sunset red persimmons hanging here and there on the dark branches. The scene ought to have been exactly the same as the one the poet Bashō saw several centuries earlier…. Every time you went there, you vowed that if somewhere near your house there might be a fir grove that would remain unchanged for fifty years, and your daughter were to spend her life playing there, not learning how to read or to work, you would not object.

The bamboo tool shop in front of Nisonin was open; a toasty kerosene burner was lit in the sealed glass room. You remembered to buy a garden rake for your father, who disliked the Japanese but felt that the little rakes made wonderful gardening tools. The owner, maybe noticing that your lips had turned purple, said politely, “It’s cold.” You understood but could not respond, so you just smiled foolishly.

The lane from Nisonin to Seiryō-ji was your favorite route, and you wove your way along in a zigzag fashion so as not to miss a single alley along the way.

Except for the color tones of the different seasons, every house remained fixed in eternal memory. There had been some notable changes during the years of the bubble economy; some families bought a car and converted part of their yard into a parking space. Fortunately, that was about all that had changed. Lush ivy covered the tops of the stone walls on some houses, while ferns blanketed the areas near the ravines. You reached out and picked a fleshy stalk with a dull glint; the cold, meaty sensation reminded you of your daughter’s fingers back when she was still willing to hold your hand. Some people with large yards were burning branches and leaves they’d trimmed from fir trees. You were nearly hypnotized by the enchanting aroma of the smoke, but managed to keep a steady pace, not wanting to be pegged as a tourist by two obasans, who, cheeks red from the cold, were chatting while cradling grandchildren in their arms. The Akita at the big house where clusters of dry reeds hung on the earthen wall the year round, the one by the bamboo grove, stared at you, just as before, but did not bark. Not one family’s cherry trees had hard little buds. If there were flowers anywhere, they were white magnolias the size of large bowls, or blood-red Chinese toon flowers, which, at their fullest, fell with their stems to the green moss below, creating an air of tragic beauty.

There are more shrines and temples, large and small, in the ancient capital than anyone knows. People favor one over the others for reasons of their own. You liked coming to the Seiryō-ji, too small to merit mention in some guidebooks.

At first that fondness stemmed from sympathy, for the temple, like its name—cool and remote—was bleak and deserted the year round. Beyond that, there was a burial stele for Toyotomi Hideyori by the main hall. When a fire raged through Osaka, Hideyori committed suicide at Tenshu Pavilion, but the whereabouts of his body remained a mystery until a few decades ago, when a dormitory for a nearby girls’ school was being built and a carefully wrapped human head was excavated. Based on the family crest on the wrapping cloth, it was determined to be Hideyori’s head and was reinterred in Seiryō-ji. Except for fees to pray in the main hall and the Treasure Room, visitors were free to come and go, so they used the main gate and side gate as shortcuts. Of course, you had also seen a college boy on his way to class come rushing in with a small carton of milk to feed a large cat. You had also seen middle-aged salary men stop off on their way home to pray, palms together. But most of the visitors were students from the Sagano Primary School, who rode over on bicycles, wearing shorts and skirts even on cold days, their red cheeks puffed up like Fuji apples. They fought to outdo each other with their boasts and arguments, shouting at the top of their lungs, like the little imps who worked for Fujiko Fujio. In addition, you saw young women in lace-trimmed aprons walking their dogs, plus a large number of older folks.

As time went by, you grew more sympathetic. Often you’d sit on a simple, crude wooden bench and let your daughter run wild like a puppy. If you came right after the rainy season, you could pick ripe yellow plums in the untended grove by the old bell tower. As the plums ripened, the side facing the sun would glow a lovely bright red, but the plums would be unspeakably tart. Unable to turn down your daughter’s invitation, you ate them till your teeth seemed to turn upside down.

This is how it was: if a little time and a little memory remained before you died and you could choose where to go, like so many people who are anxious to leave a hospital and return to a familiar place, usually their home, you’d likely choose this place, and that was because, because it was only in places where you had left traces of yourself, where everything connected to you existed, that maybe those things would continue to exist and the significance of your imminent disappearance would be diluted—isn’t that so?

You once read someone’s autobiography about life on death row. He said he saw the usual sunshine outside his window and heard familiar tunes from the guard’s radio, and knew that if they reappeared the next day as usual, his death would be of little consequence.

But why not choose the city where you were born, grew up, gave birth, and raised children, and began to show signs of aging?

Why wasn’t it the city you came from? … You sat on the bench, freezing cold, as if sitting in water.

On the wooden sign was written: THE SAGA BUDDHA KYOGEN WILL BE PERFORMED ONLY ON THE SECOND SATURDAY AND THIRD SUNDAY OF APRIL.

Maybe everything belonging to that with which you were familiar, everything you remembered, died before you.

Thinking about it now, with an ocean between you, you were convinced that it was some sort of strange river with no navigational landmarks. Living on it, you often entertained crazy thoughts about fishing for the moon or marking the side of the boat to locate a lost sword. For instance, the month before you arrived, a neighboring country undertook missile tests in the ocean north and south of your island. The island was thrown into turmoil, everywhere the buzzing of a disturbed beehive. You belonged to the group who believed that war might come, but were not afraid. Of course there were other groups … those who believed that war would come and were very afraid, those who did not think war would come and therefore were not afraid, and others who did not think that war would break out but were still afraid.

You were unafraid simply because you realized early on that, when faced with weighty matters, particularly those concerning life and death, there is little a person can do. For instance, a volcano erupts in some country, yet for some strange reason, the residents living in the danger zone do not flee. You never could figure out who was fighting whom in Central Africa or the Balkans, but the people strangely did not leave their countries. And in Kaohsiung, where cases of dengue fever occurred at a high rate, several million people continued to live without an apparent trace of fear. Or, how could the people of Dongshi County, which is flooded half the year, be so resigned to their fate?

Knowing there was nothing you could do, you followed your normal 24-hour-a-day routine. None of you had any real estate to sell and no private stash to convert into U.S. dollars at the bank, so you could only hope, like so many other people, for the first time, that the technological standards of that country’s national defense apparatus were as good as Uncle Sam’s during the Gulf war, accurate enough to send a missile unerringly to the house of the person they considered the prime culprit and ensure that no innocent people became collateral damage. Some people actually believed that to be the case; one of your husband’s coworkers, a renter, moved out and rented a new place beyond the 500-meter parameters of The Residence.

During those days, filled with jokes and clever ideas, there were times when you would be waiting for the light to change at an intersection (one day you waited a very long time because the premier was on his way home for dinner) and, gazing at the street scene, you could not help but wonder if that would be the last sight you saw it. If so, commit it to memory … but then you’d realize how hard that would be. If you didn’t take pains to remind yourself, you’d look off to the left and to the right, and, without exception, be distracted by five-, seven-, or thirteen-story mixed-use buildings covered with all kinds of strange, ugly signboards, and by the sidewalks and overhangs crowded with motorcycles, betel nut stalls, fire hydrants, and trash cans. My god! Are these signs of early onset dementia? Where is this place anyway? Sanchong? Zhonghe or Yonghe? Xinzhuang? New Developments in Taizhong or Tainan?

It was a river with no navigational landmarks. But you refused to believe that and many times thought of sticking your foot into that same river. Three thousand years, and still no change.

*When I die, you’ll find white oaks imprinted on my heart.—Thoreau

White oaks can grow as high as thirty-five or forty feet, and with their serrate leaves, they are beautiful temperate-zone trees. When the season is right, the ground below is covered with lovely acorns. When your daughter was still at an age when she went gaga over the anime character Totoro Dragon-Cat, each day she’d fill her pockets with acorns that she pretended were chestnuts. They spilled from the hotel room table onto the carpet, but the housekeeping staff never treated them as removable trash.

Honestly speaking, what would have been imprinted on your heart before you died was not white oaks.

As you walked past a run-of-the-mill barbecue shop, hot, smoky tears welled up in your eyes. Maybe, maybe this was that So-and-so Eatery. Sometimes “so-and-so” was the owner’s name, Ah-shui, or Ah-wang; sometimes it was the name of the town, like Tongluo. From north to south the signs were a faded blue that could have been intended as the color of the ocean, with red fish and curled shrimp painted on them. They were virtually identical, like the franchise stores you see everywhere these days. The eateries were usually located in the busy center of town, often by the north-to-south line train station. When your grandfather went to see patients in some far-off place or went north for a reunion with his classmates from the Taihoku Imperial University Medical School, your grandmother would shed her identity as a doctor’s wife, plunder some of her private stash, and take one of her favorite third-generation kids (for a long time it was you) to the eatery, where she’d order half a sliced cold chicken in butter and kidney cooked in sesame oil. Grandfather, who watched Grandmother’s blood pressure closely, would not normally allow her to eat too much of either. They certainly weren’t your fare—you were fixated on jawbreakers and pickled guava, so the little sundries shop under the eaves at the train station was your hallowed ground. Shrugging out of Grandmother’s hand, you ran to play under the eaves, greasy chicken skin you couldn’t swallow still in your mouth. You wrapped your arms around a smooth juniper pillar and rubbed your face against it affectionately. You sensed, at an early age, that the solemn air of the train station was out of step with your boring, underdeveloped town.

Similarly out of step was the post office. Sometimes you’d tag along, insisting upon going there with your grandfather’s pharmacist. You didn’t dare make a scene under the high-flying roof of the post office, with its dark, cold, severe airs, like an official’s residence you read about in stories. Your instincts were right. A hundred years earlier, the third Chief of Civil Adminstration, Gotō Shinpei, cited two lines from a Tang poem—“Not seeing the magnificent Imperial Residence,/How would you know the stature of the Emperor”—and carried out what he’d read without hesitation. Over the next ten years, train stations and post offices you either loved or feared were built all over the island. Even though your grandfather did not live in the old capital, still the local train station had a Renaissance-style pediment gable, while inside were substantial but smooth and intricately carved columns, minus the grooves. If you ignored the Japanese-style wooden posts and windows and the pastel blue window lattice, it would constitute a standard architectural type.

Was the confusing style all that different from the structures in Sanchong, Yonghe, or Taoyuan, which were neither Western nor southern Min nor Taiwanese nor illegal constructions? Why had the demolition of the former and new construction brought such sorrow, created such trauma? Was it simply because they harbored memories? If so, then your daughter’s generation would surely have its own warm recollections of things. So what were you worrying about? Maybe you were like people who, as they begin to age, unwittingly fall into the trap of nostalgia—was that it?

… But there must have been differences. Separated by an ocean, you were able to simplify the complexities and clearly see the sites of your daughter’s activities: school (it was only six years old, but had undergone two reconstructions simply because it had had two principals; the entryway and statue had been moved for no apparent reason, while the poor, totally innocent trees had been dug up and replanted elsewhere), home (unoccupied high-rises had been built on a nearby hill by a business conglomerate), friends’ houses (to play on the computer), classmates’ houses (to play on the computer), cousins’ houses (to play on the computer), fast-food restaurants, department stores…. When you can order fast food, all with the same taste and at the same price in eateries decorated in exactly the same style, the same tones, the same temperature in a country where even the birds don’t lay eggs, what irreplaceable memories of this McDonald’s moving one street over or that 31 Flavors ice cream shop going out of business could possibly be out there for your daughter?

Once this land no longer held anything irreplaceable that stuck to the people, they would stay because they had no choice, not because they wanted to. The new rulers surely sensed this, which is why they shouted slogans about community into the skies, hoping that would get the people to at least heed the “Buddha” (the land and the people) even if they ignored the “monks” (the state machine, the rulers). Who would dare challenge the politically correct status of the peasants? Had the opposition party, which criticized everything under the sun, ever uttered a word of displeasure about the land and its people, as far as you knew?

Your daughter would remember that which belonged to her generation, or she would feel sad and traumatized over its disappearance. And what would that be? What would be imprinted on her heart?

The pretty white oaks? The bright red, overripe plums? The tumblebug cocoons in front of Ryōma’s Tomb? The Chion’in, where she wailed after the pedometer tied to her waist fell into the toilet? The wild clams in the viaduct at Biwa Lake along Tetsugaku no michi? The “Japanese flag” koi in the pond at Rakushō? The big weeping cherry appearing in Okumura Dogyū’s painting by the gate at Daigo-ji? The Doraemon feature-length movies shown once a year on the fifth floor of Takarazuka at Sanjōgawara-machi? The rice cakes at Seigoin yattsubashi? The flocks of doves or picking up gingko leaves at Higashi-hongan-ji? The Doutor Café, where she did her homework? Or the Japanese paper shop across from Saga Station? She was so unconcerned; on the train ride there she’d plan what kind of paper to buy this time. A turn around the corner and there it was, always open, never disappointing her. A few doors down from the paper shop was a small coffee shop called Hirose. A family-style eatery with no more than fifteen seats, it was always shrouded in cigarette smoke and coffee steam, messier than any house, with newspapers and magazines strewn all over the place. Once there, she could hardly wait to open the newly purchased paper and start folding it. Looking out at the street scene through the gauzy curtain, you felt as if you’d never left, even though it had been a year or several seasons since you were last there, even though you had aged from twenty to forty-one.

Maybe that was the reason Seiryō-ji would be there forever. The seventeen temples of the World Heritage Site, such as Tenryū-ji, Seiryō-ji, and Enryaku-ji, would always be there; Higashi-hongan-ji, Nanzen-ji, Tōfuku-ji, with their cultural artifacts and designated cultural heritage, would always be there; the Nonomi-ya in Nijōjō would always be there, so long as it was located in a place with traces of human habitation. Is that so rare?

Hadn’t many grade A, B, and C relics been designated on the island in recent years? There were, for instance, Longshan Temple, built in the eighth year of the Xianfeng reign, where you and A always lingered and were always reluctant to leave. Or the Qingshui Patriarch Temple, where the nose of the patriarch fell off to alert the people in Tamsui and aid them in defeating the French. Or the Western-style missionary’s dormitory on Zhenli Street across from Tamsui High School. One summer, A was wearing an off-the-shoulder T-shirt and jeans, and you were dressed in a short white skirt and sandals. The two of you were sitting on the balcony railing of the white Western-style building, talking and laughing about something, unaware that A’s current boyfriend, an architecture major, had snapped a photo of you.

For a long time every summer you took time out to enjoy a bowl of shaved ice made from agar-agar or green bean soup at the corner of English College Road and Qingshui Street, sort of like now, when you went to the Sannen-zaka, you’d be sure to go to the main branch of Segoin for some soba and the free rice cake and green tea. Sometimes you’d get off at the ferry landing and squeeze into the crowds of tourists buying fishnet, fishing gear, fish balls, and “iron eggs” that were cooked so long they shrank drastically. You were neither anxious nor concerned; you just climbed the stairs up to the white hut on the hill. Not a soul under the melia tree, where you sat the whole afternoon, the way you’d sat in Seiryō-ji, which was cold like water. Guanyin Mountain lay quietly before you and to your right was the spire of the Presbyterian church and Mackay Hospital, showing a bit of roof. The giant banyan trees and Burmese gardenias by the hospital, built in 1880, weren’t all that different from what Lu Jizheng and Yang Sanlang had seen several decades before, when they made their sketches. Now you felt as if you’d never been away.

Until that year you took the person you were going to marry to visit your secret garden. Just as before, you followed familiar paths and walked beneath the big banyan tree by Mackay Hospital. Telling him to watch out for the wet, slippery moss underfoot, you took his hand and traversed the shaded slope, until suddenly an open space appeared before you—Zhenli Street,³³ no, it was the obligatory four-lane Zhongshan Road in every town, city, country, and village. All of a sudden you couldn’t recall what it had been before. Like an eyewitness who, after going to the police to report a dead body, returns to the scene only to see there was no body, no blood stains, everything normal, you told your future husband in a sobbing voice that the place was never like this or like this, that it should be like that and like that. In a panicky mood, you pointed here and there aimlessly; in a word, you were lost.

During the Taiyuan Reign of the Jin Dynasty a fisherman of Wuling once rowed upstream, unmindful of the distance he had gone….³⁴

Maybe this was the reason: you would never be disappointed or shocked when you walked through the ancient gate of Seiryō-ji, not caring if it was a two-star or grade A relic or a designated cultural treasure. No matter how cold it was, there were always neighborhood residents lined up to buy tofu at the door of Mori Yoshi. One day, after you die, they will still line up here in the evening to buy tofu, and it is comforting to know that after one dies the world of the living continues in predictable fashion. You weren’t the only person with such thoughts. A film director who wrote his autobiography two or three years before he died said that, as he faced death, which confronts old people every day, his only wish was to rise up in his coffin once every ten years to read the paper, that it was enough to know that the world would continue to function as usual.

You were suddenly gripped by a desire to see A, a simple desire, mindlessly believing that she was your dearest friend, someone who had been closer to you than your parents or anyone else when you were fifteen.

It was getting dark, and it looked like snow. Not another soul on the Togetsu Bridge, which was normally packed with tourists. The bridge seemed to be very long and to reach very far. You tightened the scarf around your neck, your shivering body and hesitant steps reminding you of Yoshinaga Sayuri in a still from the movie Akan, several years earlier, in which she was walking across this same Togetsu Bridge. But the broad, vast mountains and rivers, the house lights along the banks, the lantern-style street lamps, and the chilly, unending wind so special to bridges seemed to take you back to a moment before you turned five. Your maternal grandparents were holding you by the hands as you all stood on a large and very similar bridge. You’d been asleep, but were awakened to get out of the car. Grandfather pointed to the Dajia River, central Taiwan’s largest, and as you stood on the newly finished bridge, Grandmother said something in Japanese to Grandfather, heavy with emotion. Maybe she was saying “It’s so big,” or “It’s so beautiful,” or “It’s so cold.” Still wrapped in the powdery smell of Grandmother, who had been holding you, you weren’t sure what you were afraid of, maybe the darkness or maybe Grandfather.

Snow began to fall, as expected, and as you walked slowly down the Togetsu Bridge, the same sad longing, from that moment before you turned five, forty years earlier, now filled your heart.

The hotel’s English-speaking desk clerk told you there were no messages, phone calls, or faxes.

You went up to your room and turned on the TV; no news of an airplane crash. It’s not that you were overreacting, just that Americans, like A, were supposed to be punctual, to keep their word.

For the first time you sensed something strange about how the arrangements had been made; it all felt like it belonged to an agricultural age, a time when you waited even when you knew the other party was not going to show. To begin with, you didn’t know her flight number, not even which airline she had taken; all you had was that faxed message. And A hadn’t asked how she was supposed to get from Kansai Airport to the hotel, relying solely on the address, which you had faxed to her. Maybe she thought this was a tiny ancient city. Compared to the metropolis where she lived, it was no bigger than the small towns the two of you had roamed as youngsters.

Then it occurred to you that it could have been a spur-of-the-moment invitation. A might have run into a problem at work or had a fight with her husband, the man she was living with … anything was possible. Hadn’t you been gripped by a mindless desire to see her no more than an hour or two before, feeling closer to her than to your parents, even to your husband and your daughter?

You put on your warmest clothes and applied a thick layer of windscreen lotion, deciding to have some crab ramen at the corner of Tera-machi and Rokku-dōri, even though it was way past five o’clock. Before five, a set menu of a big bowl of crab ramen and a salmon donburi cost only 890 yen.

After eating the noodles, you were full and you had warmed up; the sad longing you’d felt all evening now seemed far away. It turned out that had something to do with low blood pressure. In the evening, low blood sugar and low blood pressure had created a physical warning, which in turn had prompted you to think of important things, like life and death.

You walked all the way to Honnō-ji before turning back. High school girls on spring break from all over the country came to brightly lit Sanjō-dōri to buy local specialties. Their uniform skirts were short, but they didn’t seem to mind the cold as they crowded into the Ōnishikyō Fan Shop, possibly planning to pick out a pretty Kyoto fan for their mothers, just as you had done many years before.

You’d passed the shop many times without going in, but it was always there, and that gave you a comforting sense of certitude.

From Sanjō you went to Kiya-machi, but then you weren’t sure if you should turn in or take the next street, Bonto-chō, which paralleled Kamo-gawa.

Green buds showed on the willow trees at Kiya-machi, which, under the streetlights, looked especially green and lush. There had been many streets like this in the city where you grew up, pretty streets you liked so much you found it hard to choose one over the others. Oftentimes, when you and A walked along Chongjian Avenue, the oldest street, you looked all around as you went down the stone steps. Every little alley you crossed made you feel as if you’d missed an opportunity and would live to regret it. Then there were streets on which A had lived: Yuanhe Street, Chaozhou Street, Xiamen Street, and Hangzhou South Road. Hailing from central Taiwan, she had been renting ever since starting high school. Her landlords were usually aides-de-camp or husband-and-wife servant teams left behind to collect rents for retired government officials now living abroad. Depending on their size, the houses were often divided up and rented to several students at once. You sometimes spent the night at A’s place, where you listened to phonograph records that were at least ten years older than you, all left behind by the landlord’s children, who had also gone abroad, to school. Records back then sounded as if they’d been recorded in a big, empty room (like when Nat King Cole sang “Too Young” or “When I Fall in Love”). If anyone missed the songs, they’d have a second chance to hear them forty years later in Sleepless in Seattle. It really did feel like an empty room, for even Paul Anka’s “Dance on, Little Girl” sounded terribly sad and bleak. Seated on a cypress floor mopped by the old servant woman until it sparkled, the two of you sang along by following lyrics printed on the album cover. The trees out in the yard were too dense for the chirps of cicadas to be carried in on rays of summer sun. Parts of the frame house were rotting, emitting the subtly sweet odor of mushrooms and fungi, together with the smell of green moss beneath the window, and the curved, knifelike, allegedly poisonous flame tree pods. You and A had exchanged a short-lived vow about remaining single. Which of these things would A manage not to forget?

In college, A was assigned a dorm room, but she kept her place on Jinhua Street, the last place she rented, as storage for her overflow of clothes and books. But more importantly, it quickly became a trysting spot for those of you who were madly in love. Once you waited for A outside a classroom in the College of Liberal Arts and asked if she was returning to the place on Jinhua Street. If not, you’d like to borrow the key. She said another girl, so-and-so, had the key, and she complained about so-and-so, who never folded the quilt and left food around, which attracted swarms of ants. You replied that you and X X X would make sure everything was neat and tidy before leaving, X X X being your boyfriend at the time. A gave you a look. The first month of the seventh year of the Xianfeng reign, a heavy snowfall.

You and XXX were hoping you’d be lucky, and you weren’t much good at birth control techniques, so he ejaculated onto the wood floor. You tried to wipe the stain clean, but it had already seeped into the wood. X X X flipped through A’s books and lost interest; he then picked up the records belonging to the landlord’s children, “Sukiyaki” by Sakamoto Kyū, also recorded in a big, empty room. Twenty-year-old Sakamoto whistled on the record, unaware that he would die in a domestic plane crash twenty-three years later, on August 12.

*The Taiwanese like to rebel, like moths flying into a fire, the dead followed by the living.

If A wouldn’t give you the key, you and he had no place else to go and could only pace the streets, feeling tormented. You had no choice but to pretend you were going to the movies or taking a stroll in the park or talking about your childhood or about philosophy.

Once when you were waiting for a bus, your passions got the better of you and your intertwined bodies wound up in the staircase of a dark, old apartment building, from which an old man chased you out like a couple of mongrels.

Later you actually fell in love with one of the boys and wanted to live as the sort of married couple you had always imagined. You asked A to let you stay there for a while, and you told your parents you’d been assigned a dorm room. As for the servant couple, who would only rent the place to girls, they mistook you for the spoiled daughter of their old master and were obliged to tolerate the arrangement.

When you passed the place ten years later, a sign nailed to the door proclaimed it to be the branch office of a certain “bubble” political party,³⁵ which would end up just like one of your love affairs. Another ten years went by, and it suffered a fate far worse than No. 5, Lane 50 of Taishun Street, which had been turned into the northern club office of the original inhabitants, the aborigines. It was hard to tell if anyone still lived there, for the door was nailed shut. Its black fired tiles were swallowed up by a dense cover of flame trees, mangoes, and phoenix trees that spread fast and caught up with other vegetation. The year before, when the street was widened, half of the house was sliced away and became a pit for the neighbors’ trash and junk. At the beginning of this year, it was leveled, and a construction fence was erected around it.

When the Qing government took over Taiwan, there was talk in the court about laying waste to it.

Chieko: “The parents I have now love me very much. I don’t have any desire to look for my real mother and father. Perhaps they are even among the Buddhas of the potter’s field in Adashimo. Of course, the stones there are quite old.”

The soft evening color of spring had spread, like a faint red mist, from Nishiyama across half the sky.

Gion was wall-to-wall people, all of them heading toward Yasaka Shrine. Several Japanese tourists stood outside the Yichiriki Teahouse at the corner of Hanami kōji, waiting to see the geishas. Several years earlier, you and your daughter had sat in the Colorado Café across the street, waiting to observe the geishas through a large window. Curtains covered Yichiriki’s windows the year round, but across the yard, as you could see, there was a wide-open, deserted, silent, and austere entryway, like a stage before the performance begins.

You got swept up in the crowd. Little stalls lined the streets from the shrine to Maruyama Park, some selling food, others toys. It had a New Year’s atmosphere, just like your childhood. The crowd stopped at the square with the tall weeping cherry trees; though there were daily news reports on the status of the cherry blossoms, people came every day anyway. Where else could they go at this time of year? The same was true at the shops, which laid red carpets under each cherry tree and set up lit torches at intervals along the way. Every once in a while, something would catch on fire, sending sparks crackling, which caused the frightened, yet excited pedestrians to push and shove and yell. Groups of street performers not normally seen appeared at the edge of the square. They may have been foreign students; one played a violin, another, in tails, performed a sword-swallowing routine. There was also a tall blonde dressed like a Greek goddess who played the harp, her snow-white arms bared for all to see and her blue eyes seemingly frozen over with a thin layer of ice. A TV company shone a floodlight on the big weeping cherries, for the sole purpose of illustrating yet again that it was too cold this year for the flowers to bloom.

I was at St. Mark’s Square, watching the acrobatic flights of angels and the dancing of the Moors, but, without you, my dear, the loneliness was unbearable.

You walked along, enjoying the sight of drunken people under the trees. One professional with his tie loosened suddenly spoke insolently to his female colleagues, but strangely, instead of being upset, they tolerated him with motherly smiles. The older men drank with abandon, the effects showing in their ruffled appearances. With kerchiefs tied around their foreheads, they began to sing, like your grandfather. One of them saw you amid the chaos, and drunkenly called you Nēsan—Big Sister—again like your grandfather, who would call your grandmother Big Sister after he’d had a bit to drink. What did Grandmother look like when he called her Nēsan? Did she smile foolishly? She was always smiling foolishly in front of your grandfather, but she never forgot to get the servants and your aunts—her daughters-in-law—to roll sticky rice balls and make green Hakka snacks, if it happened to be the Lantern Festival and you had to hang paper on your great-grandfather’s tomb the next day. You were disgusted by the cakes, which were green, cold, and sticky and were placed on an alpinia leaf. Everyone knew that the alpinia grew most abundantly in the graveyard, and that the pungent odor was a result of many years’ sucking on the marrow of the dead.

Afraid of eating rice cakes tainted with the smell of the dead, you avoided going to the tomb by returning to your parents’ home before the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. Years later you would become one of those who forgot you actually had a tomb to visit.

Cantonese prayed to the King of Three Mountains, those from Zhangzhou prayed to the Sage of Zhang, and those from Quanzhou prayed to the Emperor of Life.

On the eve of Misoka, the last day of the month, following customs of the season, you listened quietly and solemnly at Kiyomizu Temple to the monks ringing an ancient bell cast in 1478. On the next day, you made your first temple visit of the year at Heian Shrine, where lingering smoke from the previous day’s bonfire was frozen straight. If you remained in the area for another seven days, you would watch the wearisome old White Horse report celestial affairs at Kamigamo Shrine, where spring herbs and seven-herb rice porridge are placed in front of the deity. On the second Sunday of the Flower Festival, the Taikō Flower Viewing Procession at Daigo-ji reenacts the party attended by Toyotomi Hideyoshi at the end of the third year of the Keichō reign, when he appeared for the last time with his wife, Kitano Mandokoro, his concubine, Yodo Jimi, and his official entourage. At the end of the month, the Inari—Harvest God—Festival is held at the Fushimi Inari Grand Shrine, where the eaves are painted vermilion, the columns and beams made of black pine in a contrasting deep green color, and where the sound of drums and flutes is relentless. May is the month for the Aoi—Sunflower—Festival, but you never attended; that is the rainy season. At the end of summer, a thousand lamps are lit for the Baken Buddhist Invocation at the foot of Aiyan Mountain. Then in late September monks from Honnō Temple perform their ritual for hungry ghosts at Ōseki-gawa. At the end of October, a lingering fragrance festival takes place in Tenmangū Temple in Kitano; the twenty-second was A’s birthday.

The twenty-second was the Jidai Festival. You followed the crowd and the sounds of drums and flutes to Jingū-do via Gosho, Karasuma-dōri, and Sanjō. Paraders dressed in period costumes, styling themselves after famous individuals in history. An elegant autumn scroll depicting the history and customs of the ancient capital slowly unfurled toward you. There were the late Tokugawa patriots Katsura Kogorō and Sakamoto Ryōma; the famous Edo women Yoshino Dayū and Izumo Okuni; the Momoyama period Hideyori and Oda Nobunaga; Oharame, Katsurame, and Shizuka Gozen from the Kamakura period; and Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon of the Fujiwara period.³⁶ The final scenes were of officials at court in the Enryaku period and the archers under Tanba protecting the move of the Heian Shrine to the new capital.

As for seasonal festivals and holiday celebrations on the island, there were the welcoming of the Emperor of Life on the fifteenth day of the third month; the birthday of the Goddess of the Sea, Mazu,³⁷ on the twenty-second day of the third month; the City God Festival of Xiahai on the thirteenth day of the fifth month; the Qingshui Patriarch’s ascension after obtaining the Dao on the sixth day of the fifth month; the Water God’s Festival on the tenth day of the tenth month…. The ones you were often forced to attend were the Golden Mother’s wedding, her funeral, and other auspicious events. Honestly, her wedding, her funeral, and other auspicious events: if not, how could there have been so many festivals each year? An ugly shelter was erected overnight to block heaven and cover earth at the alley entrance of the Qihui Temple. A huge oil drum was placed in the middle of the road, with a request, written in a third-grader’s hand, for vehicles to detour. Then a dozen or more tables were laid out for three consecutive days by the faithful, who, looking quite bored, watched a pornographic version of a Taiwanese street opera or a movie directed by Zhu Yanping. On other days, the custodian and his adherents would engage in the serious business of shamanistic exercises. The site, where organizers of illegal gambling collected and paid out money, was used as a polling station for all sorts of elections; it also served a certain farmers’ association in their promotion of medicinal pollens and garlic extracts.

You were confused. Was the local temple any different from the Seiryō-ji, which was put to similar uses in the Japanese neighborhood? Whenever you walked past, there were loud broadcasts of sutra recitations and smoke from paper smoldering in the burner; the custodian, in an undershirt with the logo of X X Golden Lion Troupe, would be sitting with several notorious loafers as they made tea, scratched themselves, and watched videos of the raunchy variety star Zhuge Liang. Otherwise, why would you be willing to sit at the Seiryō-ji for a whole afternoon doing nothing, while you couldn’t wait to flee the Temple of Benevolence, which you had to walk by every day?

—Abandoning the ancestors’ tombs and the reunion of family clans, they crossed the ocean and traveled in great danger, tossed and roiled at a place where the sky ended and the ocean rose up—

That is how your maternal ancestor was described in the Zhuluo County Gazette nearly 300 years ago.

At a time when “Not a single board may enter the water, no goods may cross the border,” your ancestor crossed the ocean with nothing but a carrying pole, which is still ensconced in the family shrine. The story of this ancestor had been narrated in different versions, some relating his success, some his failure, depending on later generations’ needs when they taught their children a lesson. Your favorite one was presented by Ya’uchimara Tadao: the ancestor was a bandit in his youth, and then grew wealthy in middle age (how similar to present-day success stories).

The bachelor ancestor who carried a pole over his shoulder had once been intent upon becoming a bandit and may well have become one…. This thought made you laugh to yourself and brought a smile to your lips.

Enough, you felt that was enough, enough for one night. You could return to the hotel now, whether A was there or not, or even if she came.

An itinerant monk was still standing at the end of the Shijo Bridge; you could not be sure if it was the same one. Along the Kamo-gawa pairs of lovers in tight embrace appeared every five meters, as if following regulations. The temperature had dropped to 2° Celsius.

A large crowd filled the subway entrance of the Hankyū train to Kiyamachi. There was a one-man performance by a foreigner who, still dressed in a short-sleeved T-shirt, was drenched in sweat from singing. It was “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” a popular song in your youth. The Japanese who had requested the song was so pleased she began dancing with her girlfriend, a peach genie and a willow spirit. You stopped and joined the crowd. The willows along the Takase-gawa were incredibly beautiful. In your memory, the only comparable scene was the Suzhou described in poems and lyrics, and Master Liu’s Canal, which ran past the side gate of your college when you were still a student there.

The song ended and was followed by applause, whistles, and shouts from the young people in the audience. Someone handed the man some money and made a request, another song popular in your youth. It had a slower tempo, as if to let the performer enjoy a break. You liked the song so much you were reluctant to stay for the whole thing, so you slowly walked away.

During the Taiyuan Reign of the Jin Dynasty a fisherman of Wuling once rowed upstream, unmindful of the distance he had gone, when he suddenly came to a grove of peach trees….

This is how it should be: during the Kangxi reign of the Qing dynasty, Guo Xiliu, from Nanjing of Zhangzhou, diverted water from Dapinglin to make a canal for irrigation. He made wooden pipes to channel the water from Qingtan through the Jingmei River and turn it toward Dajianai Fortress after passing Gongguan. From the fifth to the twenty-fifth year of the Qianlong reign it was called Master Liu’s Canal.

You needed a good night’s sleep, so you passed on the rich, aromatic coffee in the many pretty cafés on Shijō-dōri.

Grabbing hold of the red-latticed door, Chieko watched as her twin sister Naeko walked away. Naeko did not look back. A few delicate snowflakes fell on Chieko’s hair and quickly vanished.

The town was as it should be, still silent in sleep. (The End)—The Old Capital.

The plane would depart at ten in the morning, so you left the hotel quite early, when the city and its streets were still in a deep slumber. You turned to look back; the only person seeing you off was the early rising hotel manager. You could not explain to him why you wouldn’t wait for the flower festival and even canceled a room you’d originally reserved for the week.

Your instincts told you that A would not come. From the start, you never really believed that she would, isn’t that so? She was more like the nightshade trees along the Sansen-dō, more like the melodious whistling of Sakamoto Kyū, more like the many summers of yore, when it was usually you who waited for her at the train station where you’d agreed to meet. The blistering sun shone down on you, but you felt nothing; your heart was young and your veins were tough enough, so you remained odorless even though your front and back were sweat-soaked. Back then there were no five failings of a deity; you were the itinerant monk on the Shijō Bridge, who never moved an inch the year round, your heart motionless as water.

You did not know when it began, but whenever your plane landed on the island with a thump, you would recite to yourself, “The residence of local savages, occupied by sea-going demons, with no system set up by ancient kings.” Reciting it as incantation, you would know that somehow it would be easier to tolerate the sticky heat once you stepped outside the airport and entered the chaos, the frenzy.

Predictably, a middle-aged driver of a nine-passenger van solicited you in Japanese and urged you to decide quickly. You guessed that he was pushing both his van and a hotel. Quietly deciding to play the role of a foreigner, you nodded in agreement and were swept onto the van like a captive. The sign informed you it was a hotel by the train station, where a good friend had once stayed when she’d come from down south to take the college entrance exams.

The hotel ought not to be far from Hon-machi, Book Street. You took out your guidebook about the island nation, which you’d purchased at the Gion Bookstore. It included maps and scenic sites from the colonial period. When he spotted your map as he climbed into the van, the driver pointed enthusiastically, gesturing like a mute to show you the location of the hotel. His expression was that of the “smiling face, friendly” islander described in the guidebook. You smiled and nodded politely, then turned your attention to the van in which you were now a passenger.

You woke up from a light sleep, plagued by worries of a fire breaking out. Map in hand, and wearing the lightest clothes in your suitcase, you began your walking tour, obediently following the guidebook suggestions, starting with the observation station of the skyscraper near your hotel.

The skyscraper was listed at 244 meters, the tallest structure in Taiwan, and a close match to the Tokyo Government Office Building.

You had never seen the place where you’d lived for more than three decades from this height or angle. Maybe the gods looked it from such a distance, which for them was neither too far nor too close. It was only from this distance that the houses about which you’d commented a few days earlier in the nine-passenger van, “My god, it’s a miracle anything could be that ugly” disappeared. Airplanes landing at Songshan Airport every five minutes floated slowly past the Jiantan hill like eagles. Ah, there’s the Taiwan Shrine. Next should be the chokushi, the imperial messenger road, which ran past blocks of buildings. There, off to the south, was Taihoku Government House, with the eastern line of the Sansen-dō in plain view. According to the book, Taiwan, with its long summer and coconut trees lining the streets, has the flavor of a South Sea island, and, owing to its beautiful scenery, is called the Little Paris of the East. Extending to the south were #2 Girls High; Shinmachi Church, beneath a canopy of livistona and date palms; the Research Institute of the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office; the Medical Specialization Section of Taihoku Imperial University, which Grandfather had attended; University Hospital; the headquarters of the Red Cross (you had to erase the tall office building of a certain political party, which was so disgustingly ugly it ruined the skyline); the clownlike, pitiable Keifuku Gate; the broad avenue at Tōmon-chō, which was called neither Jieshou nor Kaidagelan, and the Taiwan Governor-General’s Mansion. You finally had a chance to see the garden in the back.

That was where you’d hung out in high school and wondered what was on the other side of the stone wall that took up so much space. Without having to know it was built in the first year of the new century, you were pleased with its Renaissance flair. Several of you sitting in your school uniforms on the spotless red brick sidewalk in front of the stone wall, for some reason all smiles, mouths open, captured in a photograph. Across the street was the Imperial University Hospital, designed by Kondō Jyurō in the same Renaissance style. Later you saw a similar black-and-white photo in your grandfather’s college graduation yearbook: several young men in May Fourth attire sitting on Changde Street. From the kanji in the Japanese description on the photo’s edge, you guessed this was the street they’d passed most often, the one they’d remember forever.

In the future, these could easily become the indelible memories of white oaks for your daughter, so long as you looked down at the city from this angle.

Just as the trumpet starts to play “Sleepy Lagoon” in Woody Allen’s movie, when the MRT train slithered among bleak, uneven buildings, you looked down at the city below, and the music that sounded in your mind was Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” so often used as background music for New York City. But you were immediately reminded where you were, for the exclamations around you were coming from people who spoke Japanese and were also holding colonial maps.

You left the building, originally the Railroad Hotel, and saw that the escalator entrance was where you had all come to stand in line once a month for bus passes.

Walking toward Hyo-machi, from a distance you could see the memorial museum for Governor-General Kodama and Chief Civil Administrator Gotō in New Park to the south. The book devoted considerable space to describing this structure, which was the single most typical work from the peak of golden age architecture. It must have been a hundred years since your last visit to the park. Now you learned that there had been a marble statue of Governor-General Kodama in the spot where the flower clock had stood, and where trees were planted following the construction of the 2/28 Peace Memorial, and that Claire Chennault’s statue had replaced Gotō Shinpei’s, which had been built with donations from Gu Xianrong and Li Chunsheng.³⁸

The 2/28 Peace Memorial³⁹ confused the New Park in your memory. Oh god, who had those olive trees offended this time? Unable to find them, you reluctantly left the grove and went to find the beautiful Spanish-style house, which, you now learned, had been built sixty or more years ago and had served as a broadcasting station. Back when you were picking fallen leaves and daydreaming in the nearby sweet gum grove, it served as offices for the Central Broadcasting Company, but it now housed the Parks and Streetlight Maintenance Office of the Municipal Bureau of Public Works.

The sweet gum grove was still there, but you suspected that the trees must have been cut and trimmed; such sparse trees could never have provided all of you shelter as you gossiped and dreamed your foolish dreams. You had all looked up to see a clear blue sky serving as a backdrop for temperate-zone leaves that had barely managed to turn a soft yellow. After a while you forgot where you were, and were able to fantasize about where you wanted to be someday, even though most of the places were located at the far corners of the world. Those “abandoning the ancestors’ tombs and the reunion of family clans, who crossed the ocean and traveled in great danger, tossed and roiled at a place where the sky ended and the ocean rose up” were not limited to your ethnic group, who had been criticized because their fathers had arrived in Taiwan in 1949.

The guidebook recommended that after leaving the park through the side gate near Sakae-machi, you go to Takasegawa Bookstore. You recalled the ground floor entrance, which was dark and cold as a fairy cave. The spiral staircase rose along one wall, its grindstone steps worn smooth and cold after so many years. Often the aroma of newly steamed rice cakes seeped through the wall from Three-Six-Nine next door, forcing you to abandon the books. The fairy cave was leveled in 1980, and a new glass curtain building was erected at the site, where it still stood.

The original Bank of Taiwan was a mansard-style wooden building designed by Nomura Ichirō in 1903. By 1934 it had suffered severe termite damage, and it was rebuilt in 1939 into its current form. You and A had enjoyed walking through the area, but strangely, neither of you had ever looked up to study the entire structure, as you did now. Back then you’d agreed that this bank (you couldn’t tell how it differed from other banks) would be just like the place where Audrey Hepburn lingered in Breakfast at Tiffany’s whenever she was feeling blue; all it had to do was replace its windows with glass display cases filled with pretty jewelry and things like that.

The Taiwan Governor-General’s Office, completed in 1919, was based on Nagano Uheji’s winning design in an open competition. The central tower was lower in the original design, which could be verified with a picture in the book. It did look weird, and was later raised to a height of nine stories, but in your memory it could not have been altered.

On October 31, the Governor-General’s Office had organized an advance, exclusive opening for its neighbors. You could not recall if it was required by the school, but you all happily lined up to enter the building, where you bowed and passed on auspicious birthday greetings, after which you were each given a steamed bun in the shape of a peach. You had been so innocent, so naïve, like genteel granddaughters, and it probably wasn’t until twenty years later that you understood and had to sigh over an international news report of people wishing Kim Il Song a happy birthday, the smiles on their faces so obviously genuine.

How you envied those girls who had not lined up for a steamed bun (in your memory, there actually were a few in your class), who were neither moved, motivated, nor brainwashed by the patriotic education from those in power. Some were even so shocked by looking at the party flag that they trembled with fear, a reaction that differed radically from yours, for you immediately thought about Lu Haodong, the revolutionary, and Huanghua Hill, and felt hot blood rage inside you. You were all in your teens; how had they managed to do that? How had they saved themselves the trouble of taking a detour in their future enlightenment and growth, as well as in the development of their independent, autonomous personality? It would probably have been easy for a PC writer twenty years later to portray one or two of them as surviving family members of 2/28 victims, or as people whose property had been legally appropriated under the land reform policy, or as those who gained enlightenment after reading magazines such as Free China or Daxue, purchased at Guling Street. If not, they’d have had an older sister or a boyfriend who had secretly distributed political pamphlets for Kang Ningxiang or Guo Yuxing.⁴⁰ But how had your classmates managed to do that? There might have been family members of victims among the few you recalled, girls who were either perfectly clear-headed or indifferent to everything. One of them, after twenty-odd years of no news, contacted you before the mayoral and gubernatorial elections, but before you even had a chance to chat and catch up, she urged you to vote for a certain candidate from a particular party. Another one, whose father ran a sundries shop in Dadaocheng, had studied political science in college and then continued her studies abroad. Her ideas had been strikingly novel during your school years, and you were amazed to learn that she had seriously considered accepting the military education teacher’s invitation to join the Nationalist Party and work for the government after returning from study abroad. You suspected she might have preferred to remain undercover or to sign on to the project of systemic reform. But she too invited you to tea just before the election and asked you to support the reelection of her boss, which also amazed you.

—What had those girls who turned down the peach-shaped steamed buns back then been thinking?

After the Governor-General’s Office, scenic spots on Hon’in-machi included Taiwan Power and the Governor-General’s Library. Standing on Hon’in-machi I-chome, you looked left to Taoyuan Street, where the row of noodle shops had all been torn down, the site now closed off by a construction fence. To your right, said the book, was Tamsui Hall, which had been the Dengying Academy. In 1898, Gu Xianrong had bought the place and turned it into Taipei New Stage, but that had been bombed out by the Americans toward the end of the war. What stayed in your memory was the Chinese Womens’ Anti-Communist Association, but none of you could figure out the function of anything with such a long name. The only exception was: for one of the nursing classes each semester the class would be brought here to make for the benefit of front-line soldiers, no, not uniforms, but cotton balls for dressing wounds. You girls talked and laughed while you turned out cotton balls that were either too big or too small, too tightly or too loosely packed, all twisted or simply dirty, and no soldier would ever have been desperate enough to use one.

Nogi-machi. An all-terrain vehicle was parked outside a big house that was all but engulfed by banyan and sweet gum trees and plastered with militaristic stickers. Like Zhou Zhirou’s Spanish-style house the next block over, it hadn’t changed a bit over the decades. At unchanged houses like this trees in the yard grew wild (the original owners had mostly planted trees with, yes, a South Seas flavor—coconut, betel palm, mango, banyan), obscuring the tiled roofs and stone walls, thus avoiding attention. There were many like this, all easily named. They sought anonymity because the residents were retired officials of the ancien régime who still occupied official residences. The somewhat more honest and upright among them were humble, careful people who tried to keep their children and grandchildren from troubling shows of arrogance. Still, many of their offspring would arrive home in the middle of the night and lay on the horns of their ATVs and sports cars to get the retired aides-de-camp or aging servants to open the gates for them. Some second-generation children initiated all sorts of stealthy improvements upon their return to Taiwan after schooling abroad. These included adding brick facing to the house in Lane 259, Section 1 of Fuxing South Road, with its fourteen coconut trees, or the property overgrown with Chinese magnolia, nightshade, and camphor in Lane 97, Section 1 of Xinsheng South Road. In the late 1980s, these families acquiesced to the demands of bored third-generation offspring who returned to Taiwan over summer break by cutting down trees and laying concrete for basketball courts, thus creating in these overweight youngsters the illusion that they were future NBA superstars. If you don’t believe me, ride the MRT past the official residences along Fuxing South Road and Da’an Road, and you’ll get all the proof you’ll need.

There were also places that incited public outcries, such as the house whose enormous yard was overgrown with eucalyptus and bauhinias in Lane 135 of Rui’an Street (the house alone was half the size of Heping East Village, which housed several dozen families across the street), as well as the He’an neighborhood house next to Taiwan Normal University High, in Lane 14, Section 3 of Xinyi Road. These houses were likely the residences of presidential political advisors or national policy advisors, for they came equipped with guards and sentry booths. The He’an neighborhood provided a classic contrast: as if by prior agreement, houses in Alley 17 (an odd-numbered alley) were all occupied by high officials—numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4. Separated only by Lane 147, the people who lived in Alley 12 (an even number) were humble citizens of a tumultuous age who had to crowd twenty to thirty families into a single aging illegal structure.

Slogans to incite patriotic sentiment among the humble citizens had once been pasted all over the He’an Neighborhood bulletin board, but in recent years, in response to the new ruler’s concept of a community with a common destiny,⁴¹ the slogans, now noticeably gentler, announced cozy activities asking the residents to create a sense of communal identity…. You were curious to know how communal living that involved both the humble citizens of even-numbered alleys and the high officials in the odd-numbered alleys was possible, so long as Lane 147, a demarcation between opposing powers, existed, even for a day.

Some of the families had managed to resolve property rights issues and had remodeled their houses in styles that reflected the periods during which their second-generation offspring returned to Taiwan, or their academic majors, or the places where they had lived overseas. There were: a Harvard shoebox house in the Gropius tradition, a Mies-style house in glass and steel, one following I.M. Pei’s design when he worked at the Stone & Webster Engineering Company in Boston before becoming a master architect, and a Mier-style house with gigantic glass walls. The limited space and dense population worked against development of designs by Louis Khan and another master, Frank Lloyd Wright, designer of the Imperial Hotel, which, along with the Kuandong Earthquake of 1923, ended the era of Japanese-style architecture; he once said that cities are bases for banks and prostitution, strewn with weedlike skyscrapers.

These remodeled houses were subsequently altered by rental and real estate agencies so drastically that the original concepts were completely obscured. Barred windows, air conditioners, even store signs disfigured the vertical surfaces, while the concrete was so filthy you suspected that addicts’ needles must surely be piled up in the stairwells. The rare space that retained traces of its original design was now usurped by motor scooters during the day and vendors of fruit and deep-fried chicken strips in the evenings. Some with a little remaining original flavor could be found in Lane 10, Section 3 of Zhongxiao East Road, which paralleled Ji’nan Road; happily, its simple concrete surface had no mosaic or gaudy veneer tiles. Plants that produced light effects were preserved and clear windows replaced the old ones as boutiques sprouted up along the lane, very much like the row of old apartments on Omotesan-dō in Hara jyuku. There were also simple, ten-story apartment buildings like the one in Lane 97, Section 1 of Xinsheng South Road, where two sweet gum trees rose as high as the building and the design followed the credo of “Brick is humanist,” covering the exterior with warm, dark red bricks. On cold days, lights were turned on early. If an apartment building had later gone up in Peyton Place and Allison had had nowhere to go, like you she’d have submitted meekly to marriage. She’d probably be settling accounts under a light like this, or reading a novel and waiting for her daughter to come home after school.

*Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference.

Seimon-chō, now Ximen ding, was situated at the site of the long since demolished West Gate. Neighboring streets included Suehiro-machi, Kotobuki-machi, Tsukiji-chō, Shinki-chō, and Wakatake-machi.

The last time you were here might have been right after college graduation, when you took in a movie with your boyfriend, who was on leave from the army. He told you that two different types had come up to ask if he wanted a date during the ten minutes he was waiting for you. One of them, seeing his military uniform, had even assured him, “Hey, silver bar, don’t sweat it, there’s a colonel downstairs right now,” meaning that a low-ranking lieutenant like him had nothing to worry about.

You didn’t tell him you were ten minutes late because you had to reject a determined old man who had offered to take you in as a foster daughter, had changed that to having lunch with him, and finally to just his giving you a pair of shoes. Seimon-chō looked so pathetic, no longer the pleasure district of your school days. You saw, for the first time, its decline, its filth, its noise. The snacks in the vendors’ stalls were unappetizing. The Bee Gees’ “Saturday Night Fever” blasted everywhere. Low-quality, glitzy disco clothes in the store displays underscored the resemblance of the places to aging, heavily powdered prostitutes trying to turn a trick or two. Overcome by sympathy, you decided not to go there again; it was the least you could do for the area.

By reading the kanji in the guidebook, you discovered that the Wanguo Theater, which you’d never entered, had been the Shōnichiza, which had shown only Japanese plays. The Taiwanese theater was located at the site of the current China Cinema; Yoshino kan became Meilidu Cinema after the retrocession, then Guobin Cinema, where you saw The Godfather several times. New World Cinema used to be Shinseki kan, and you recalled that it was where your grandparents had seen Daibosatsutōge and Aizenkatsura. On Katakura-dōri, behind the theater, there were restaurants where sushi, hatkeni, kabayaki, and yakitori were all available. Since you couldn’t read the Japanese script in the guidebook, you didn’t know if the restaurants had been there before or were there now, but, like the last time you visited the area, you chose not to go see for yourself. Like a regular tourist, worn out by too many new things and sights, you found the brick edgings of a flower bed by a tree and sat down to tour the city on paper.

The tree turned out to be a small-leaf Indian almond, one of many lining the street. Green smoke seemed to rise from the shadows of the trees, which filtered the light extremely well; resembling elms or some temperate-zone species, they actually came from Africa, which was hard to believe. These trees and the dita barks planted on the sidewalks and close to buildings were less than ten years old, whereas the silk cottons had been around for roughly thirty years, and were most commonly seen near junior high school campuses (unless the buildings were old, then yes, there would be banyans, Chinese gum trees in the north, and flame trees in the south, and trees with a South Seas flavor, which you knew by heart—betel palms, mallows, and coconuts). Whoever planted this tree surely hoped that the fast-growing silk cotton trees would help the mass-produced buildings quickly shed their look of newness—small trees, new walls—and would look as if they’d put down roots and been around for a long time. In political terms, wasn’t that the reason so many Taiwanese had been employed in Chiang Ching-kuo’s administration during that period?

In the forty-eighth year of the Kangxi reign of the Qing Dynasty, the Quanzhou immigrant, Chen Laizhang, was permitted to develop the wilderness of Dajia nabao, and Mengjia gradually grew into a village….

During the Taiyuan Reign of the Jin Dynasty a fisherman of Wuling once rowed upstream, unmindful of the distance he had gone, when he suddenly came to a grove of peach trees in bloom … the wild flowers grew beneath them, and fallen petals covered the ground—it made a great impression on the fisherman….

It made a great impression on the fisherman. He went on for a way with the idea of finding out how far the grove extended. It came to an end at the foot of a mountain whence issued the spring that supplied the stream. There was a small opening in the mountain, and it seemed as though light was coming through it….

So you chose to walk back to Seimon Market through Suehiro-machi. The kanji told you that the building always plastered with posters for pornographic movies and replete with homosexual stories had been completed in 1908, and was also designed by Kondō Jyurō. Its octagonal shape was based on the Chinese hexagram, with the idea of warding off evil spirits. The outskirts of the Seimon district had been a cemetery for Taiwanese, a place where wild animals often dashed out and frightened people. So, to fend off the evil spirits, they traveled all the way to the Inari Shrine of Fushimi in Kyoto, where you had watched the Inari Festival in early April, and invited fox spirits over. It was just like a fable. What had attracted you to that fable had to do with the spirits that had ended up here after a period of wandering, just like you. Their ancestors had fled the disorders of Qin times and, having taken refuge here with wives and children and neighbors, had never ventured out again; consequently they had lost all contact with the outside world. They asked what the present dynasty was, for they had never heard of the Han, let alone the Wei and the Jin.

Given your complex, even confused state of mind, you decided not to follow the guidebook’s suggestion to visit the old sites of Kōkaidō Hall or the Provincial Yamen. Nor did you stop at the old sites of the Military Governor’s Yamen, the Governor-General’s Mansion, or the police substation. The current Police Bureau site also had small-leaf Indian almond trees, which were several stories tall and looked as if they’d put down roots and been there for a long time, although in fact they weren’t even ten years old.

Looking south to Kyō-machi, unable to decide whether to go back to the hotel to rest, you saw the familiar rounded sign, DOUTOR, written in chocolate color on a wheat-yellow background.

Doutor, your secret garden, your little concession, where you drank coffee that had cost about the same as now. Looking around, you found it hard to see how it was any different, for it also had a “droppings lamp,” the name you and your daughter had invented. Any Doutor chain with a large enough space would have a similar chandelier hanging from the ceiling; the beehivelike lamp shade was a mosaic of clear and irregular tea-yellow glass. You and she had once seen a news report about the storage tank on an airplane that malfunctioned at an altitude of several thousand feet, sending human waste falling like ice cubes into the bedroom of a small-town Midwest American family. The unknown objects that fell through the roof and awakened the sleeping couple must have looked something like that. You called it a droppings lamp, under which your daughter did her math homework on the central table, her round little face framed by two loose braids, at the age of seven or eight, a period when she was still willing to hold hands with you.

The hotel clerk still hadn’t figured out where you were from and continued to speak to you in heavily accented, all but incomprehensible Japanese. You guessed he was trying to tell you that you got a better rate of exchange for your money at the hotel than at a bank. Turning him down with a smile, you decided to continue being a foreigner.

After another confirmation of escape routes that included the fire escape outside the window, you felt safe enough to stand by the window and look down at the street, where shops had already turned on their lights, even though the sky to the west of the city was still quite bright. The city’s west side had always been like that, due perhaps to the nearby river. In high school, when you girls hadn’t felt like going home but needed to talk, you often took the road just beyond the gate, so absorbed you crossed the street without realizing it. When you reached the Patriarch Temple, you would, as if by prior agreement, turn back or walk down a street to the right, feeling that another country lay ahead of you. The river was in sight where the road ended, but you wouldn’t go there. Later, when you came across the phrase “Numerous thefts in broad daylight,” you settled on the idea that it must concern the river’s pier, to which you had never gone, without even checking the actual meaning of the phrase.

Wondering about the progress of the cherry blossoms, you turned on the TV in your room and easily found NHK News, whose familiar tone and unintelligible language were hypnotic. You’d missed the square with the weeping cherries at Maruyama Park.

No news of the cherry blossoms, nor of a plane crash anywhere. You fell asleep fully dressed, not even remembering to remove your contact lenses.

In the third lunar month, Chinese roses spread their vines, magnolias write on the sky, amalanchiers explode with color, weeping willows fall on the water like duckweed, begonias sleep, and hydrangeas fall.

On the third day of your holiday in this southern nation, you rose early, feeling an urge to blend in. And so, following a crowd of people heading to work and to school, you roamed around Hon-machi, where only a third of the bookstores were still open for business. You couldn’t recall where the O-mei Restaurant or Maxim’s had been, nor could you remember what had originally occupied the St. Mary’s and KFC sites. So you retreated to the teahouse on an upper floor of the Mitsukoshi Department Store in the concession, where you had your Western-style set breakfast and picked up the morning paper, which you put aside after reading the first few pages; numerous thefts in broad daylight.

The First Zhongzheng Branch of the Police Bureau had been an examination hall in the Qing dynasty, where the topic for the free-verse poem for the Xiucai exam had been “tap water and telephones.” In 1895, when Japan colonized Taiwan, it became the Second Infantry Regiment’s Field Hospital. After the Army Medical Chief, Mori Rintarō, whose rank was equivalent to colonel, landed at Aodi in the company of the Crown Prince, Kitashiragawa no miya, he was stationed here. Mori’s army journal would later be published by Iwanami Bookstore, under the pseudonym of Mori Ogai.

You followed Mori Ogai’s daily strolling routine, hoping that the old governor, who had occupied No. 5, still lived there. You didn’t know who lived in No. 1, whose owner, like your grandfather, had survived in the South Pacific and returned to plant breadfruit trees, described by Darwin as “especially eye-catching, with their broad, smooth, deeply lined leaves,” which now completely covered the beautiful tiled roof. You wondered if your grandfather, who had studied and interned around here, had seen this place while strolling in the area and vowed to build an identical home in the future. A giant breadfruit tree in the northeastern corner of your grandfather’s house shaded an entire lotus pond, an orchid shed, and grapevine trellises. Only the plum tree and the generations of dogs that guarded the side entrance did not fall under the breadfruit tree’s shade. When your grandfather was off seeing patients, you picked the large leaves and tied them together with grass stalks to make boots, which you wore to ward off leeches as you entered the pond to catch fish. You never ate the breadfruit, though the neighbors took some home to put in their pork soup.

Of course your grandfather might have vowed to imitate yet another place, No. 5 of Xuzhou Road, at the far end of the school. At his house there was an identical entryway for bicycles, a reception room up front, and a study on one side, where he saw his patients. The hallway connected to the living quarters and a nursery. Toward the rear were a dining room, the kitchen, the maid’s room, and the bathroom. A typical Showa-era house of mixed Japanese and Western styles.

Again following the routes of Mori Ogai and your grandfather, you crossed the eastern line of the Sansenō. A filthy old bus too impatient to wait out the red light took up half the pedestrian crossing. Its sign read DANHAI. You rapped on the door and the driver opened it to let you on.

Taishō-machi. To the left was Zhao’an Market, Zhao’an Hamlet. The people of Zhao’an, Zhangzhou, made a living fishing—

Mitsuhashi-machi. The gunite exterior of the Renaissance-style bank was filthy. It had taken the place of a small community park with lush, fragrant grass and pretty flowers. The vibrant greenery had been an essential sight when you looked out at the street scene from three of your favorite coffee shops (CAT, Roundtable, Dream Café), all of which were now gone.

Miyamae-chō. That southern Min–style, red brick restaurant—strange, what had been there before? … Whatever happened to the Taiwan Cement Building, for which you had little emotion and few memories, but whose existence had been so familiar? … Foreign workers and Filipina maids congregated outside St. Christopher’s Church.

Maruyama-machi. The bus traveled over the Keelung River on the Meiji Bridge that was to said to imitate either the Niju Bridge at the Imperial Residence or the Uji Bridge—in the twelfth year of the Taishō era, while visiting the Taiwan Shrine, the Crown Prince had praised the Meiji Bridge with the words, “Pretty scene, unending green field, flights of egrets, lovely sight”—A gust of fetid wind; they looked for the spots he had noticed, but they lost their way and could no longer find the route.

If not for the fire caused by a Japanese fighter plane shot down toward the end of the war, the ruined Taiwan Shrine would have been a lot like the Yasaka Shrine, which you visited often. In Governor-General Nogi’s time, the Imperial Council decided, on advisement, to build the shrine in Taipei, Taiwan’s control center. Tainan and Keelung had both been considered. The reason for the final decision was: if the ancient city of Taipei was to be considered the site of the imperial residence, then the Keelung River would be the equivalent of the Kamo-gawa and Jiantan Hill would be Higashi-yama, making the geographical location of the Taipei Basin a simulacrum of Kyoto.

You did not know which route the bus would take, the Qili Coast and Xialaobie in the foothills, or Dadu Road after a left turn at Wang Family Temple.

As if drunk, the driver kept passing other vehicles and laying on his horn, something that hadn’t changed in decades; that, it seemed, was the sole job requirement for this company. You watched him as he pocketed fares. In urging passengers to board quickly, he helpfully waved off their attempts to put money into the fare box, offering to do it for them so they could quickly find a seat. He’d toss the coins noisily into the box, keeping the bills curled up and hidden in the palm of his hand. Then when he came to a red light, he’d touch his nose and scratch himself before wedging the money inside his sock. In your youth, you’d have exposed him, even at the risk of being beaten up. But now you simply looked outside at the Guandu Plain, which had been bought up by conglomerates of self-employed farmers. People who stole a fish hook were punished, while people who stole from the country became high officials; when the thieves came, you welcomed the thieves, and when the thieves left, you welcomed the officials, the so-called loyal subjects of the Great Qing.

You were hoping that the bus would take the Dadu Route, for the guidebook said that the hundred-year-old nightshade trees on the western line of the Sansen-dō had all been transplanted to Dadu Road.

The bus raced past the entrance to Dadu Road without turning; alongside the broad field were enormous signs advertising large showrooms for Toyota, Subaru, and Chrysler, just like small-town America.

The bus flew past the Guandu Temple Pass, a place you hadn’t visited for a very long time.

The bus driver pocketed three passengers’ fares; numerous thieves in broad daylight. You were puzzled by sights along the hundred-year-old highway, which itself resembled a redistricted area in a new town or city. Could the eucalyptus trees along the highway also have been transplanted to Dadu Road? The Tamsui MTR Line’s cement wall blocked out the mangroves and the river. Whether it was an official from the central or a local government, from the ruling party or the opposition, everyone vied to see who loved this island more. It was indeed no easy feat to love this island that much.

The bus traveled at a maddening speed; the closer it got to your destination, the harder it was to recognize the route. Although you were seized by shock and doubts, it never occurred to you to ask for help from Mister Driver, who was too busy pocketing bus fares. You were like a real foreigner, certain that others would not understand your question.

In your flurried and flustered state, your gaze fell upon some Chinese hibiscus outside the window—there beyond the screw pine grove and the Chinese hibiscus was the ocean—so you decided to get off at the next stop.

It turned out to be Youchekou, where, in 1939, the Japanese Shrine was completed.

You started walking back alongside the short bend in the river, where you girls had enjoyed watching people fish, watching the tides rise and ebb, watching the mist rise and fall in the Guanyin Mountains, gazing at the stars, watching fishing boats enter and leave port, and feeling the urge to go out to sea with them. Occasionally, when one of A’s male friends had some money from a tutoring job or had been paid by a magazine for photos, he invited the two of you to Banyan Gardens, where you ordered a bottle of beer and a plate of stir-fried little shellfish, and talked about the national shame of the nearby Dutch garrison, called the Red Hair building, until you choked on your own words.

The price of coffee in Banyan Gardens had spiked. After silently calculating the exchange rate, you realized it was more expensive than in any other country (except for the Blue Mountain coffee in the Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), but you needed to sit a while to put your colonial map in order.

It was so cold outside that you were the only person sitting beneath the tall banyan tree. The wooden floor at your feet was raised above the river, like the Kamo-gawa cooling bed in the summer.

The scene before you, the spot where the river meets the ocean, was the same as that you had seen at the age of sixteen. How could it compare with what had been seen by the sixteen-year-old young man in 1939? You were curious about that sixteen-year-old young man’s feelings, as someone who had witnessed the daily construction and eventual completion of the shrine, and about his feelings when he saw, while leaving high school each day, senior Japanese officials entering and leaving the golf course. Maybe he felt that great men should all be like that. Otherwise, many years later, when he became the head of state, how would he manage to ignore criticism and find his own enjoyment there?

Walking along the riverbank, you believed that the sixteen-year-old Iwasato Masao⁴² had also enjoyed after-school strolls here. The houses with tiled roofs covered by Chinese hibiscus had been official property and concessions during the Qing dynasty, then became administrative offices and official dormitories once the Japanese took over. Again, because great men should all be like that.

To your surprise, you actually found the lane directly opposite Lane 11. With a quickening heartbeat, you started up the stairs, but were blocked by an iron gate. Afraid that your memory might be faulty, you returned to Zhongzheng Road and walked up the alley by Fuyou Temple, made a left at Chongjian Street, crossed someone’s front yard, and arrived at a small path midway up the hill, where you saw the red brick building below. But again you were blocked, this time by a gray wall. Had it possibly been designated a historical site and moved away from you? The coptis tree was still there, and under it sat a sixteen-year-old white skeleton gazing out to sea, which did not surprise you at all.

You were forced to follow the little path that stuck in your memory toward Qingshui yan, Clear Water Cliff. The noonday sun shone down on the river, the glare so bright you had to look away. “The ambience of Nagasaki, the scenery of Kagoshima,” is how the Japanese described the ancient city before you, which must have been during Iwasato Masao’s youth.

This was the first time you saw no incense smoke rising from the burner; the Clear Water Patriarch Temple was undergoing a renovation. The scaffold blocked the front view, with old workers straddling the roof ridge. You felt sorry for the temple, now imprisoned, for the broad, open view from its yard in days past was now obstructed by ugly apartment buildings on either side, allowing only a glimpse of rippling water through a narrow opening. You had already decided not to visit the area around Mackay Hospital, Zhengli Street, and Dingpu, fearful of getting lost and not knowing how to get back.

Ducking under the scaffold, you entered the temple of the silent, black-faced patriarch, flanked by the masters of the Xiao family and Western Qin. You prayed to him and drew a fortune-telling lot. It was number 46, a good draw on your first try. “The appearance of things has not changed,” it read. “The mountains and rivers are the same now as they were in ancient times. If you desire to know what is on your mind, flowing water will bring good news.”

You headed down the stairs. There were few visitors at the ferry landing. Pretending to be a tourist and mingling with them, you did not know where to go now. Maybe take the ferry over to Baliben, on the far side. Schools of flying fish the size and brightness of gold coins broke the surface of the river and sailed into the air, a sight you desperately missed. In the end, you decided to take another ferry and go upstream, like the ancestors, the Spaniards, and the Dutch, to Dadaocheng. The guidebook informed you that your tour would be complete once you visited Dadaocheng.

As you kept an eye out for the arrival of the ferry, you felt like Koxinga of 300 years before, who climbed a tower to look west to the Pescadores Islands and wondered, “Has the grain barge arrived yet?”

The barge you were waiting for was called Mahāsattva, the great bodhisattva, but it would not take you across. Worried that you might be considering suicide, since you had been pacing the landing too long, the seasoned owner of a Taiwanese sausage stand, who let buyers win sausage in a game of roulette, struck up a conversation. You told him you were waiting for the Mahāsattva Ferry, only to be told that business was so bad it had stopped running quite some time ago.

Left with no alternative, you returned to the market by Fuyou Temple to wait for the bus. Now that the morning market was over, the swept-up fish blood and scales baked in the sun, emitting a scent of wronged ghosts. You imagined that the more than 200-year-old Fuyou Temple across the street, crowded with the roiling, noisy fish ghosts, would ignore you…. For a brief moment, you could just about recapture the sensual feeling of being sixteen. The sun poured down like hot water, and you, overdressed, were drenched in sweat; but you waited, with all your heart and mind, for something impervious to all poisons.

*A land with no master; an island with no chance encounter.

You opted for an express bus, expecting it to take Dadu Road, for you were determined to see the old nightshade trees that had sheltered you girls all those nights when you were sixteen and seventeen and had never once laughed after listening to all the silly things you said to them. If those old trees were still there, then many other things would still be around. It did not matter whether or not you saw them, such as A, such as the Old Moriyoshi Tofu shop by Seiryō-ji, such as the white oaks imprinted on the heart of Thoreau before his death.

The bus passed Dadu Road, driven by yet another drunk driver similarly focused on pocketing bus fares. Given that there were no bus stops or stoplights on Dadu Road, at that speed, if the bus had had wings it would have soon been airborne. You sped along, spotting old trees that looked like injured veterans, the ends of their amputated limbs wrapped in straw, as if bandaged. The guidebook said they were transplanted in the third year of the Heisei era,⁴³ but why did they show no signs of putting down roots and sticking around? Except for a very few that had small clusters of green leaves, most had turned into specimens and models, like the skeleton under the coptis tree by Red Tower.

Upon discovering that you had witnessed his thefts, the driver slammed on the brakes over and over, maybe to eliminate you by flinging you out of your front seat and knocking you unconscious—on warm April days when the sun was out, snowy white moneses appeared at east-facing corners of the ancient city; eleucine crept up on roadsides. In May, before the rainy season, the lemony yellow oenothera would bloom in profusion; the Chinese fern would open up in dark cool cracks in walls and fences, whether someone was there to appreciate them or not. The month of June saw the purple spiked loosestrife, while American radix flowers could be seen all over vacant lots, and yellow chrysanthemums like ragweed covered hillsides along roads in Osaka. Mounting the stage in July were the calystegias, which were in fact impomoea, which could be easily seen on the sandy beach with pandanas and Chinese hibiscuses—the driver failed to knock you out, and you stumbled off the bus at Nissin-chō near Taihei-chō.

You ended up leaving the colonial map on the bus. The bus was long gone. After a brief inventory, you discovered you were also missing the hat that made you look very much like a foreigner, which was no big deal, since it was actually an out-of-season DAKS fisherman’s hat bought at the Takeda-shi in Nishiki-shi.

The streets all had the appearance of municipal redevelopment, except for the bridge in the distance that arched brightly into the sky. It must have been the Taipei Bridge over the Tamsui River. You walked along, following the landmark map in your head, to Dihua Street, where you had shopped for all kinds of things for the three major holidays of the year.

The red brick Western-style building on Ganzhou Street had been leveled, in spite of its having housed the Planning Committee for Recovering the Mainland, and a rehab center for opium addicts during the Japanese occupation. So you were forced to enter from Lane 49, one side of which was taken up by food stalls packed with diners who looked up from their four-herb soup or oyster pancakes to stare at you. The looks in their eyes were of indifference mixed with curiosity, sort of like yours when you sized up girls clad in Chanel suits at Doutor. But you were not holding a map and your clothes were rather ordinary, so why were they “shocked to see the fisherman?” Mustering the courage, you fled past them, like double-time on a parade ground, toward Cisheng Temple, where, again, many eyes looked up at you from the stalls lining its wide and open courtyard. So you had to pretend to be interested in the temple, but, god, you hated the idea of going in, because it was so unimaginably ugly. A huge yellow acrylic sign with red lettering gave the temple the appearance of a trade shop, yet you felt sorry for its life of misfortune: over the past hundred years, it had first escaped to Eiraku-chō from the armed fighting in Mengjia, and then been moved here after city replanning. The dedication gave the date as DRAGON BOAT FESTIVAL OF THE SIXTH YEAR OF THE TONGZHI REIGN⁴⁴ on stone pillars encircled by iron bars as if for fear they would be stolen.

You retreated to Taihei-chō, to the Dadaocheng Record Store, now closed, likely turned into a residence for cats or ghosts. The First Theater had become the ten-story Da’an Bank (cities are bases for banks and prostitution, strewn with weedlike skyscrapers, Frank Lloyd Wright said). You backtracked to North Street, where yellow rays of the afternoon sun slanted into shops whose owners sat like mannequins; the goods they were selling, too, were imitations—farming implements, leavened rice buns, lanterns, spirit money, vegetable seeds—making them look a lot like museums of sorts. Someone was brushing a big old British sheepdog, a live one, in front of the Tiger Mark Instrument Rental Shop. No. 321 was in total ruin, completely absorbed by demonic kidney ferns and ficus. The section of Lane 342 beyond the arched walkway was completely deserted, the walls, like the one at No. 358, covered with slogans cursing the new mayor: WE’LL LET THE PLACE FALL APART BEFORE FALLING IN LINE FOR PRESERVATION.

Returning to familiar Central Avenue, you tried your best not to be distracted by goods under the walkway eaves (except for buying half a catty of dried scallions and jelly figs in Kamo-gawa Shop—Oh no, has even Guo Yimei, next door, been moved to Dadu Road?). Concentrating on appreciating the baroque or modernist design on the front of each shop, you tried to transform the street scene into the painting Picture of Disaster Relief on South Street done by Guo Xuehu sixty-odd years ago. You found the main branch of the Ganyuan Herbal Medicine Shop in the painting, and it turned out to be the Ganyuan Shop where you had made frequent purchases of ginseng roots and bitter-peeled tangerines. Images of ginseng were carved around the ox-eye window openings on the third floor; blooming wayfaring plants, ferns, and tree saplings grew out of cracks in the wall. Xinjiyi, at No. 88, across the street, had Corinthian columns with acanthas leaves on the second floor, but its resplendent baroque flavor was not enough to keep its owners around; the new owner was the vibrant sparrow banyan spreading out from the cracks in the walls.

Similarly embracing your impression of the turn-of-the-century painting Small Food Vendors in Eiraku Market by Tateishi Tetsuomi, you walked toward Minato-machi from the alley across from the Xiahai Temple of the City God, but since the sacred ground of the 2/28 Incident was now occupied by Black Beauty Restaurant, you could not pay your respects.

You walked past what had once been called Liuguan Street, imagining how the feet of the spoiled sons of Lin Benyuan of Banqiao never touched the ground, since they were installed in sedan chairs whenever they left their house. At the corner of Guide Street, Inagakei Tōbei from Hyōgo County had once run People’s Home and the Inari-kō Charity School to give the poor, colonized children a free education. The place was now the location of the Co-op Bank (city, bank, prostitution). You continued on through the forest, and where it ended at a source of water, there was an empty warehouselike building. In the 1920s, the Culture Association led by Lin Xiantang and Jiang Weishui held forums here every Saturday. Now tic-tac-toe games had been drawn in chalk on the gray cement walls by children, one of whom, impatient with his opponent, had written, “The Zhuang family has a tagalong.” The ground under the walkway eaves had been trampled cold and smooth by the children’s bare feet.

Feeling a powerful urge to go barefoot, you walked by the onetime residence of Li Linqiu, following the aroma of tea. The structure that managed to rise to the same height as the ugly apartment building next door was the baroque-style mansion of tea tycoon Chen Tianlai, a must-see place for Japanese aristocrats visiting Taiwan, who referred to it as “a typical Taiwanese residence.” From the second-floor balcony it had been easy to watch the sunset and the forest of ships’ masts on the Tamsui River. But now you’d have to level the apartment buildings across the way and demolish the River Expressway and levees before you could appreciate why Chen Tianlai had lavished so much money on his precious house. The aging Governor-General had a pair of ancient eyes. Chen Shoushan, his most prosperous descendant, had retired. Could he have been as sanguine as the black-faced patriarch, who said, “The appearance of things has not changed; the mountains and rivers are the same now as they were in ancient times”?

When you walked out of Jian-chang/Qian-qiu/Gui-de Street, on one side was the River Expressway, where dump trucks and the Tonglian buses raced noisily along. Not far from where you stood was a kindergarten that had been the residence of Gu Xianrong. If you turned around and followed Minsheng West Road, you would arrive at Bolero Coffee Shop and Jiangshan Pavilion. In your grandfather’s album of black-and-white photos was a group photo of his class, a couple of dozen men in Japanese yukata. In one of the lower corners was written: “Taken at Jiangshan Pavilion on such-and-such date in such-and-such year of the Showa reign.” At first glance, you couldn’t be sure, but you had the distinct impression that Jiangshan Pavilion was a pleasure house, and you were embarrassed that someone as stern as your grandfather would have frequented a pleasure house and, like everyone else in the photo, not have been able to hide the smile on his face, looking as if all great men should be like that.

Jiangshan pavilion was run by Wu Jiangshan from Jinjiang County in Quanzhou. The Four-tiered Ryōtei, built in the sixth year of the Taishō era, with the same materials as those used for the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office and Museum, was now the locale of the Jiangshan Shrimp Fishing Farm.

But where would you be when you walked past the small sluice gate after risking your life to cross Huanhe Road (the dump trucks, as usual, showed no sign of slowing down or braking when they came to a red light)?

There was a small opening in the mountain, and it seemed as though light was coming through it. The fisherman left his boat and entered the cave, which at first was extremely narrow, barely admitting his body; after a few dozen steps it suddenly opened out onto a broad and level plain … it turned out to be the Dadaocheng Pier for the Mahāsattva Ferry. You were hoping to use the toilet in the tiny pier office, but you didn’t see even the shadow of a dog, let alone a person. So you headed toward the riverbank.

This riverbank had no rich fields and pretty ponds. No mulberry, bamboo, and other trees grew there, no criss-cross paths skirting the fields, no sounds of cocks crowing and dogs barking, but where were you? The moon obscured the ferry landing while the tower and balconies were lost in the fog. The slanting sun shone down on the rippling surface of the river, so blindingly bright you could not keep your eyes open, so you stayed clear of the river and walked toward a spot where there were mulberry and bamboo, afraid you’d see a corpse floating on the river.

The spot where there were mulberry and bamboo was actually taken up by Chinese hibiscuses and banyan trees, under which were a basketball court on the east side and a skating rink on the west; they hadn’t decided what to do with the place. Alongside the basketball court was a small temple covered in white tiles commonly used for public toilets. Not knowing which deity or ghost was installed inside, you kept a respectful distance from both. Even though there was indeed a public toilet on the other side of the wall by the temple, or so the sign said, you stayed away, uninterested in the possibility of rescuing a victim of an immoral act, whatever that might be: an old man raping a young girl or sodomizing a little boy, a middle-aged woman seducing a young man, or what have you. So you walked toward the place in the distance where men and women were coming and going about their work in the fields. The clothes they wore were like those of ordinary people. Old men and boys were carefree and happy. Actually, most of them were sitting under the tree on rickety rattan chairs either they or someone else had discarded. They were waving fans, making tea, picking teeth, digging between toes, and listening to plays whose characters you did not know, while caterpillars slithered down along tiny threads from the Chinese hibiscuses overhead. That was the drawback of Chinese hibiscuses, caterpillars and spiders often hung from them at various heights, so no wonder they gave the impression they were filthy.

When they caught sight of the fisherman, even though they didn’t ask you where you came from, you wondered how they could tell you were a foreigner, as you reflected that you’d lost your colonial map and had no red letter tattooed on your face. Many years ago, you’d taken your then young daughter to the site of Da’an Park before the old structures were demolished and the residents relocated, with the intention of telling her you’d grown up in this neighborhood. You’d barely entered the village when pairs of eyes the same age as your father’s came at you, showing surprise and fear, and they asked you where you came from. You didn’t think you looked all that different from other young village women, children in hand, and had no idea how a single glance could have marked you an outsider. You told them the truth. It turned out that there had been a massive protest against the demolition and relocation, and that the villagers had thought you were a reporter or a rubbernecker. After clearing things up, they began to complain to you, but as he was about to go away, the people said, “There’s no need to mention our existence to outsiders.”

But you and the men and women under the tree spoke different languages, so, afraid they’d be able to tell who you were, you shambled off. The bare, unpaved ground had probably just been submerged under water that had spilled over the riverbank, and you sank a couple of inches. The slightly odorous, potent, marshlike ground was covered by tiny ball-like crab droppings. As expected, you heard the men and women behind say something, but you ignored them, preferring to head toward the sunny basketball court where a few youngsters were having a pick-up game, not caring if she was invited to go to their house, where she would be served wine while they killed someone for a feast. You weren’t surprised. The blindingly bright sun’s rays were saturated in moisture. Wasn’t there a movie scene where a group of people who are neither vicious nor benign join forces and kill an intruder, or a stray dog, one afternoon out of sheer boredom? Then they yawned and continued waving fans, making tea, picking teeth, digging between toes, and listening to plays whose characters you didn’t know, while caterpillars slithered down along tiny threads overhead.

Their ancestors had fled the disorders of Qin times and, having taken refuge here with wives and children and neighbors, had never ventured out again; consequently they had lost all contact with the outside world. They asked what the present ruling dynasty was, for they had never heard of the Han, let alone the Wei and the Jin….

A helicopter hovered in the air, probably searching for a corpse floating in the river; an old man on a motor scooter that belched dark smoke came toward you, an old woman seated behind him, then passed by, probably on their way to identify the body after being notified of the drowning; a pack of wild dogs was now under the Chinese hibiscuses, all looking up at you, neither barking nor wagging their tails, and that included a puppy that, normally not on its guard, was looking at you coldly; the high-pitched sounds of a funeral song came to you softly from the far side of the river; someone was burning leaves and grass, giving off a smell that had hung in the air ever since humans had learned to use fire; the young basketball players had vanished, leaving an orange ball bouncing on the cement all by itself; near the overpass, the gray wall that kept getting taller, like a prison wall, was clean and unmarked, no graffiti, nothing!

A shimmering ocean, a beautiful island, the essential site of our sage kings and wise elders’ destiny.