The first time we went up into the mountains and came back to school with weird feelings my friend’s Chinese Co-Teacher, Mandy, lowered her eyes and whispered, “ghosts.” She did not wink or giggle with her hand over her mouth as she often does. Back from our latest excursion, this time south of the city in Woulai up Mount DaTong, my boyfriend Max felt light-headed and woozy. Was it altitude sickness? A flu? I did not mention ghosts but I thought of them. On Monday he felt worse but taught anyway. On Tuesday he could not leave bed so I substituted for him and then rushed home to take him to the hospital. In the NTU Hospital we wandered around the halls following signs with “Emergency” on them. Sick Max walked like a mummy through the suspiciously empty halls while I bolted around like someone being chased by one. Finally a doctor led us to the right place, which was temporarily outside due to construction. A woman behind the emergency desk asked Max if he knew how many centimeters tall he was, how many kilograms he weighed… did he know his temperature was 40 degrees C? (Did you know that’s about 104 degrees F?). He knew none of this. I felt scared and so confused.
In the waiting room I read a Jhumpa Lahiri short story outloud, watched a middle-age man in a fancy suit receive news that made him and his wife cry, watched another white person with eye sockets so dark they looked purple talk to a doctor, wondered if that would be our doctor, wondered when the hell a doctor would come around to talk to us. Max hung his head between his knees.
After an hour a woman called the name Maxevan (they squished his name together like that). She was our doctor and I liked her a lot. She used lots of big medical language but called poop poo-poo. I was so thankful she gave me jobs to do, “Fill with warm water to here and stir in medicine so like mud. Make him drink.”
A nurse gave him a shot that brought the fever down and made him feel better and then she hooked him up to an IV. Eventually they wheeled us out of the main room and into a room off to the side. A large young man with a soiled T-shirt and a mouthful of beetlenut behind his face mask (we all wore one) brought Max another blanket when he saw me trying to prop up my scarf behind his neck. He looked after a skeletal old man, perhaps his father or grandfather, who was throwing up little bits every few minutes and later started pooping feet away from us into a toilet with wheels on it, the bloody tissues passing through our periphery no matter how we shielded our eyes. I read the rest of the story out loud and around one in the morning his fever broke, they unplugged the IV from his arm, and with medicine in hand we were free to go home.
I took the next morning off from work to look after Max and make sure his fever stayed down. I realized that this was sort of a silly thing to do but I was scared. In a way it was more for me than for him that I stuck around to make soup and watch him drink water spoonful by spoonful. It never even occurred to me to stay away from his flu and had it occurred to me I wouldn’t have stayed away anyway, so it was no surprise that into Wednesday I started feeling sick. Thursday we stayed home all day, taking turns in the bathroom, struggling just to rearrange a pillow or press “play.” My head ached so bad it crossed my eyes if I sat up. Friday we made it to work but with warnings bubbling in our stomachs all day and night and into the weekend.
Through all of this it rained. We never woke up to circling dust illuminated by yellow morning light as we do most mornings below the big window. Instead, a daytime version of dark and the tapping of rain on the tin roof next door brought in each new day we were sick. I was grateful for weather that condoned my lethargy. In health I’m able to stop depressive tangents before they start, better able to see and appreciate the good stuff, the possibilities all around, but this past week that rational ability was lost on me and my sadness colored everything about my life here. I wanted to go home, fall into the net of the familiar. Seven months seemed too far away. Max and I started talking a lot about next year and the Nelson family trip around the West, the prospect of working with big kids, the next year in Philadelphia, Portland, New York, Ecuador? I was trying in vain to fast-forward. On the way to work on Saturday Max asked if we could please stop talking about stuff that’s far away, if we could remember that will feel better soon and that this living right now is wonderful. “Yes!” I said, noticing that a little amusement park on the river, seen from the train on my first trip to Shilin, was being taken apart big metal piece by piece.
After getting lunch with friends I walked home from Gonguan looking for streets I’ve never before been down. I passed a school at recess, plants growing between the metal bars of balcony grates and dangling, casting shadows on the smooth gray and green surfaces of apartment buildings. I passed hundreds of petite sweaters kicking around in the wind or hanging still in the narrower alleys, cloth-masks pinned to lines too, and then, near home, the tree that grows out of a doorway at a forty-five degree angle and the random sparkling public bathroom tucked between two buildings. Someone put a big bowl of cat food in a doorway with an umbrella placed next to it for hungry street cats to keep dry in case it starts to rain. I heard the sounds of birds and of a stiff broom on a tile floor, someone practicing piano and then more piano sounds tumbled out of a neighboring window fighting for a different mood.
Today is sharp cold and sunny. The air is drier than usual so the chill doesn’t slip into my marrow. I wear my coat open. My stomach has settled and I sit on a plastic playground in a park near home sipping lemonade with honey and pieces of aloe that break with a splash between my teeth. Old women in wheel chairs and matching maroon hats sit side by side in patches of sun. A woman with a wrapped leg tries to walk in circles around the cement circle. Every sunny morning I pass a dozen or so middle-aged women slowly practicing coordinated dances to Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" in that cement circle but this afternoon it’s all hers. Two old men blow snot rockets and play Chinese checkers in the gazebo. A young woman uses one of the metal ellipticals built into most city parks. She smiles at me and I think, This is my park. These are my neighbors. I think about how I am finally starting Chinese class tonight and how afterwards I’m looking forward to stopping by the bar with all of the old records. Or maybe we should go to the bar with the narrow second-floor porch overlooking Shida and just watch people. The man who used to sell bad burritos out of a truck in the night market now sells them there.
Finally I am healthy, sitting in a park, looking, drinking lemonade on a Wednesday afternoon in January for crying out loud. It’s less that things are looking up and more that I am.
Hello again Taipei, you look great.
Too sick to write lately, I painted a picture. I'm sorry I've been so out of touch. I'm back now.
