We go because my college roommate told me to. We also go because we’re exhausted and this seems like something fun and relaxing.
Marina and I walk through people jogging and doing tai chi in the park. It’s the final leg of our trip and soon we will return to our home in Japan, our Golden Week adventure completed.
For the last nine days, we’ve bounced around Taiwan, visited temples in Cambodia, eaten our way through Singapore on a mind-boggling series of round-trip tickets with our friend Lynn. At our last stop in Singapore, Lynn and I expelled the sick we found in Cambodia, and we all spent more hours inside the hotel than feasting on the foods of Lynn’s home. Now Lynn is at home an extra night and here we are in Taipei. The sun is out, the park green, my stomach settled. To the teahouse we go.
Lynn laughs when I say my first impression of Marina was that she’s kind. It was my second night in the city and a group of us walked down the sidewalk past the intersection with decaying manatee frescoes—homage to fossils found in the city, but nobody really seems quite sure why they’re there—past the Italian restaurant, past the eyeglass store with a giant pair of red frames reaching above its roof, frames that make me think instantly of The Great Gatsby but will come down when the building is bulldozed. When we arrive at the park outside City Hall, a park that used to be a different building, we explore the beer festival. I buy an IPA in an orange can. Marina breaks my 10,000-yen note so I have small change. I don’t yet know in Japan people carry sums of cash that would make my knees knock in the States. She translates for me and chooses the right coin when I pay five yen instead of fifty.
Marina comes to my rescue a lot. An American from DC who studied abroad in Nagoya, Marina is adept at navigating Japan and its customs and how they feel to an American. Her mother Japanese, she also gains cache as a hafu in our city of canola fields and mountains.
The teahouse is hidden by trees, as if this pocket of nature in Taipei has sprouted a teahouse for us to find among skyscrapers and funky cafes I’d like to visit if we had more time. We’re greeted in English and seated on the floor of a room with big windows and people next to us speaking quietly, relaxed. My college roommate is Taiwanese and would brew tea in our dorm room. I’d find clumps of damp grasses and leaves in the steeper and in the trashcan. The electric kettle would still be warm.
Now we’re far from my college in Maine. Our server brings us heavy English menus, parchment between sturdy bamboo boards, and we flip through not knowing where to begin. He recommends beginning with one pot and some sweets and then trying another. The descriptions of the teas are endearing, and we settle on one best enjoyed with an old friend.
Marina’s apartment is messy. It’s also the biggest of the three of ours, so we go here for our hangouts. We make a list of movies that we all need to watch. She refuses to accommodate the horror Lynn and I like, so not until I return to the States will I see Get Out. We chip away at the list, accomplishing most in winter, huddled under the warmth of her kotatsu, and drinking Japanese liquor from cups she’s recycled—green glasses that once held umeshu, plum sake. We learn it’s easy to steal Marina’s stuffed mascots from her. Every town in Japan has their own cutesy ambassador of local culture. One time we steal the monkey she got on our road trip to Wakkanai, the northernmost point of Japan. Another time it’s the cute red demon from her girls’ onsen trip to Noboribetsu.
Clutter in her apartment all has stories. Using his best English, a boy came up to her at an arcade and offered her the Yoshi he won on the claw game. She made his friends laugh when she responded in Japanese. Above her bed are photographs of college friends, of family, of Fushimi Inari in Kyoto that make me jealous until I too make the trip. She buys good furniture and pillows from Nitori so that we’re all comfortable when we come over. Yen hide among her knick-knacks and I always shout, “Money!” to get a rise out of her.
We’re always getting a rise out of her. In our group chat, Marina sometimes talks to herself to make a plan, to process things. Lynn and I don’t know when to interject. We only do to make fun of her thinking aloud again. She processes aloud and over text. I get peeved by my phone buzzing so much in my pocket. When I’m home in the States and Lynn and Marina stay another year in Hokkaido, the stillness in my pocket hurts.
But in her apartment, we can all process together. The two of them are introverts. When I leave, they talk about needing me to get them out of their apartments in winter. So in her apartment we draw ourselves under her kotatsu and drink from her recycled cups and eat food we’ve all gathered to incentivize Japanese studying we’ll abandon for something more interesting.
In our building we all hear our neighbors through the walls. Once a week my neighbor has a female friend over. I can’t determine if they whisper or if the walls are thick. I wonder what Marina’s neighbors hear of our movie nights, our nabe parties, our endeavors making gyoza. Can they hear our movies? Do they think we’re loud foreigners? Are we just whispers too?
***
We take turns steeping. We recycle water to warm the teapot and our cups and then we pour for each other. Tea works its way through our bloodstream into our core and extremities, slowing everything down. We take small bites from mung bean and pineapple cakes. We have all the time in the world and we don’t know what time it is and we don’t know if we ever have to leave.
We talk about college. Marina left math and computer science to pursue Asian Studies at Georgetown. The more right-brained one in a family of biochemists, physicists, left-brained academics. We talk about the college search and ending up where we did. I wonder how necessary every step was to get me here. If not my college, would there be no Japanese classes, no interest in life abroad, in Japan? Would I be in Boston at this minute? I look across the table at my old friend with tea, who I was anxious to spend one-on-one time with for the first time since we met, who obviously it would be so natural to be alone with, who I’ll see again in a bookstore Starbucks in Bethesda when she’s visiting home for the holidays and I fly to DC to visit her and I’ll think back to this moment and this teahouse. I think of steps and choices and alternate universes and only want to inhabit this one.
Our next day we go to Jiufen together. We find the bus stop and board, leaving Taipei, watching through the windows as skyscrapers transform to hills to valleys to mountains and ocean. We arrive and wind through streets on foot, eating ice cream, drinking bubble tea, watching outdoor cats watch us from perches on stoops and motorbikes. In Jiufen, we have nothing to do but be there. It’s a change from our structured exploration of Angkor Wat and our food-poisoned tour of Singapore. Now we can pause. Now we can reflect on the trip, on returning home the next day.
Jiufen is most crowded at night. Red paper lanterns illuminate its stairways and alleys and the tourists packed inside them, imagining themselves spirited away. We visit by day. That night, Lynn will return to Taipei and we’ll hike Elephant Mountain and we’ll watch the city glimmer before us and laugh and talk about home and race down into the city to eat mango shaved ice before returning to our home. By day we’re here, though, and the day may unfold before us.
I don’t remember if either of us slept on the bus ride back. I remember wanting the hills to unfold into rivers into ocean and back into hills again. A tesseract containing us a little longer.
The tea begins to trickle. We decide how to split the last bites of cake, making them into impossibly smaller halves, half-lives Marina’s family may study, half-lives that will lengthen our stay. We pay and don’t mind how much it costs. We walk back through the park where now the sun has set and the tai-chi classes and Frisbee games have concluded. We can’t stop talking about how we feel–like we just had a massage or visited a hot spring or meditated–how we needed this on this trip. We’ll get dinner at the night market and return home early. There will be bugs on the floor of our Airbnb and the TV will come on for a bit before we decide it’s enough. After showering and saying goodnight, when I lie in bed, I feel, I think I feel, the tea in my blood, binding old friends together.
The pausing is exquisite.
