藕斷絲連 is a Chinese idiom. It roughly translates to The broken lotus is connected by its fibered thread. 阿婆, my grandmother, described it to me one night in the dining room of what used to be our apartment, tucked away in the hills of Taipei. I was probably tracing sheet after sheet of Chinese characters, painstakingly going over each brushstroke with an incorrect pencil grip, fostering the bump on my ring finger that still exists today. Homework took hours back then. I can see it—me, my black head bent over a workbook; her, trying to distract me with an affection reserved for her first granddaughter. She brought out a bowl of clear soup, sliced lotuses floating on top like lily pads. In a language I can now scarcely understand, she explained that the distance of the bodies does not account for the closeness of the heart. Lovers part with souls full of yearning. Clean breaks seldom exist in life. When my mom returned from work, I immediately asked her if she and Dad were “藕斷絲連”, which was met with two generations of uproarious laughter. These days, I find that the saying describes my relationship with Taiwan very well.
Taiwan is an island I lived in from the ages of two to six before moving back to the US, and I wouldn’t say my childhood there was a positive experience. My grandmother attributed my lack of friends to my “softness”; being an only child robbed me of the survivalist nature siblings usually adopted. At school, social norms escaped me, and I was usually the outcast. I distinctly remember being too much. Too loud, too messy, too slow. The academic environment was rigorous and unkind, resulting in hours of homework that ended in tear-stained worksheets. Once, in second grade, I waited patiently as the teacher passed back our math tests. I never got mine, so I raised my hand to dutifully let her know. In a dramatic display, Teacher Lin presented my despicable failure to the entire class: An appalling 80%, circled in red. She spent the next few minutes yelling at a seven year-old for her whopping federal crimes of: Not memorizing the times table properly, misunderstanding word problems, and failing to correctly add up triple-digit numbers. She let me burn in the limelight of shame before continuing on with the day. (What strikes me as the craziest thing about this interaction to me is that some of my American friends would breathe a sigh of relief at an 80% test score.)
As a result, when my mom spoke in her perfect, unaccented English about a promised land I never knew, I tried to lose myself in whatever snippet of American life I could find. I was thoroughly immersed in the vast lore of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. I grew up listening to classic Broadway tunes, mainly from Rent, and sat beside Mom as she played Tori Amos on the keyboard. Having spent her high school, college, and early adult years in the US, Mom made sure that English was a regularly spoken language in our household. Today, she likes to joke that when we were in public, she’d always scold me in English so that the passersby wouldn’t understand. She saw how Taiwanese life was treating me and moved me and my grandma to Southern California.
Considering my past, it was no surprise that I would be so eager to forget Taiwan. Within months of residency in the Land of the Free, I lost most of my ability to read or write Chinese. I practiced English daily in church and at school, and it seeped into my home life until it was all I spoke. The obedient, studious nature enforced by Taiwanese institutions died as my personality emerged. Because I have no family in the US except for Mom, all of the holidays we had previously celebrated—Lunar New Year, Tomb-Sweeping Day, the Mid-Autumn festival—were put on indefinite hold. It has been more than seven years since my mom and I celebrated the new year at all.
California was a fresh start: A sunny paradise where teachers were just happy you participated and a considerably smaller number of peers disliked me. Shedding Taiwan came naturally. America is called a melting pot for a reason, right? It was all too easy to be woven into the quilt of red, white, and blue. Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning will do that to a person. But as the country I used to reject escaped me, I felt the threads connecting me to the island start to pull. It was as if I was bait cast on a fishing line, thrown out across the Pacific, only to feel the gentle rewinding of the spool. Halfway through my adolescence, I now find myself yearning for an idealized version of the very island that mistreated me.
For example, anyone who finds it in themselves to sit through more than two conversations with me will discover that I am the president of the Taiwanese Culture Club at my high school. (There are a number of freshmen that can recount what it’s like at Club Rush—the crazed face of a five-foot-nine East Asian girl as she shoves a flier in your hands with the practiced dialogue of “Please join the Taiwanese Culture Club, where we reconnect with Taiwanese culture, eat Taiwanese food, and partake in Taiwanese customs!”) The outside of my bedroom door is home to two 春聯 my mom purchased in Taipei. Sometimes, I will listen to Crowd Lu, a Taiwanese artist all my friends are sick of hearing about, and try to decipher the lyrics, which are mostly about breakfast and breakups. (Some of my favorites include 再見勾勾 and 口水劉下來.) In third grade, my first experience in an American school, I approached the first two girls I saw speaking Mandarin and introduced myself as Taiwanese. In typical Chinese-accented Mandarin (with the over-enunciated r’s, you know the one), she informed me that Taiwan belongs to China. After that, I have always corrected my Chinese friends who responded with the same rebuttal, insisting with a firm hand the difference between the two nations. In these ways, I try to hold on.
This is mostly attempted to no avail. To quote Eric Liu, “The forgetting is relentless.” So it is. I am still a 外國人, a foreigner. Recently, a waitress spoke to my mother in Mandarin before switching to English for me, even though I had replied in her first language just one interaction before. Did she not recognize my two words of thanks? Of course, knowing my insecurity, Mom insisted that I could hold a conversation in Mandarin. In stuttering humiliation, both the patient waitress and I concluded that my lackluster skills necessitated practice. But that’s hard to come by. As I previously mentioned, English is the only language I speak at school. With my grandma back in Taipei, my Mandarin became sloppy. My stepdad only speaks English. I could follow through with my mother, but sometimes, in a moment of brief impulse, I’d say something in Mandarin, only to be met with a blank face and the panging realization that she didn’t understand my stubborn American tongue.
My family vacationed in Taiwan in December of 2022. It was my mom’s and my first time back in the motherland since 2019, courtesy of the pandemic. The airport doors parted and I was embraced by my island’s unrelenting humidity. Mom made conversation with the taxi driver and I heard the rough accent of my people’s dialect. I saw 啊婆. We grabbed breakfast, danbing with garlic soy sauce, onigiri from 7-11, a medium cup of iced milk tea. The lady running the stand recognized my mother from when she used to frequent the exact spot every morning. My little cousin ran to my arms. Everything I chose to forget came flooding back in a truly shocking wave of nostalgia.
Yet there was still so much unknown to me. We took a rickety bus up to my childhood home, winding bumpily around a hilly path. This wasn’t near the city, more a suburban area. We stopped at the lobby entrance. It should have meant something, I think, to see where the schoolbus used to drop me off every afternoon. Perhaps I should’ve spent some time on the stone steps reminiscing. But I didn’t. My mind had already desensitized myself to what is, to this day, my longest place of residence. The narrow streets surrounding the area were surreally unfamiliar to me. I found myself wondering what we were supposed to do in a community neither of us inhabited. At family reunions, I saw that brown hair gave way to white, that there was more illness, one less person, one less dog. My grandma’s younger siblings, who used to come over every Saturday for 麻將, had stopped their annual gathering ever since their mom died. We greeted each other like strangers. A not-so-distant cousin who I remembered as a snide boy turned out to be a friend. I thought that Taiwan was the one who had changed to a dramatic extent. Perhaps I was also culpable. From 2019 to 2022, I had grown from a girl about to enter sixth grade to a moody teenager halfway through freshman year. My height increased at least five inches, and my footing was more sure. Upon my return in 2023, when we visited last, I’d ditched the large black glasses and resorted to contacts. The makeup I currently wear every day is alternative at best and clownish at worst. I had also dyed parts of my hair a pink-ish purple. Change, change, change.
Don’t ask what I ended up making of all this. The question still stumps me—Why doth the lotus thread remain ever unbreaking? To prepare for this essay, I asked my mom. In a that-settles-it tone, she replied, “Because it is in your blood.” I have to disagree a little. After all, my grandma, who feels no connection to China, was born there. Still, there may be some truth in that Taiwan has made an imprint on me, whether I like it or not. When I saw a group of schoolchildren bickering on the MRT, I wrote a poem in my Notes app. I see myself in all of you. From the famous Taipei 101 skyscraper, I looked down, almost a tourist, from the eightieth floor and tried to spot my AirBnB through the floor-to-ceiling windows. My dad made food for me, a Japanese-style steak don that I used to slurp up whenever we had our weekly hangouts. However random this fragmented collection may be, the one thing I keep finding in common is that a piece of me (my soul, my heart, my spirit, whatever) was recovered in each instance. The Taiwan familiar to my childhood self wasn’t nice at all. But it cared enough to store the happy memories in little pockets. It trusted that I’d be forgiving enough to reclaim what I lost when I scattered to the winds.
Charis Chu is a student at Chino Hills High School and the president of its Taiwanese Culture Club. She has an insatiable hunger for reading novels and has been writing since she was nine years old. She maintains the delusion that her wit is as sharp as her eyeliner. You can find her on Instagram @lerlerchu and her club @chhstaiwanesecultureclub.
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