But thinking about my mom in the context of Taiwan softened all her angry habits. I imagine I’m not the first she’s pinned like this under cross-examination. In my mind it’s a blade she sharpened over time against roguish street merchants; hungry boys attending her university, which had just gone coed; and the American housing authorities, preschools, and pediatricians her new husband trusted her to deal with after they emigrated.
I’d always looked up to her as the woman who’d lived a hundred lives but never preached about it. She had been a casual witness to a tumultuous period in Taiwanese history known as the White Terror—the second-longest period of martial law in world history which was sparked by the Nationalist Party of China, or Kuomintang (KMT), retreating to the island in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Growing up, she was constrained by the government’s regimented programming: from withholding her native dialect, Hokkien, in public to obey the Mandarin monolingual policy, to shearing her younger brothers’ heads so they conformed to the government-regulated hair length for males. My traveling to study Sanmao was a way to glimpse inside the beginning of my mom’s own odyssey.
If there was ever a time to chase a ghost across the map, it would be when we arrived, just as the lunar calendar turned to Hungry Ghost Month, when familial ancestors are honored and spirits from the underworld wander among the living.
While I spent plenty of time scrutinizing papers under bright white lights in the archives of the literature museum in Tainan and deciphering dense academic articles on the Dell monitors at National Taiwan University, most of my source material was too alive to fit inside an academic citation. Cropped out of the brochures and the magazine spreads that depict Taiwan as a tropical retreat for Americans is the casual chaos of the island I grew up visiting—the street dogs of my parents’ small township in Nantou airing out their balls, the cicada killers mounted over their plump catches on terrazzo driveways ruled by noodle hawkers, the mashed mounds of betel nut fibers bleeding out onto the streets. As I thumbed through Sanmao’s personal musings and first drafts of well-known essays with vinyl-gloved delicacy at the air-conditioned Taiwan Museum of Literature, Tainan’s humidity still felt lacquered onto my forehead.
My most vivid memories from the trip were the long and hard-fought transitions between research stops, always with my mom at my side. I was grateful to have her as my dance partner as we were shooed out of the lobby of Crown’s office, featuring a floor so waxed that any argument we made for our case to speak with editors simply slicked out the automatic doors. I even appreciated her need to document every moment in a selfie as we stood on the balcony of Sanmao’s home, hoping the digital amber of the photo might preserve the feeling of hovering above Chingchuan’s dense forest canopies.
On our last day in Tainan, after going to temple to pay tribute to our own passed relatives, we sat by the ocean. The beaches here ought to be described as brûléed, I thought, based on how glossy and tanned they were. Though a detail I hadn’t remembered as a child was the shrapnel of soda tabs and diaphanous patches of plastic bags embedded in the surface. Pings of follow-up emails from my sources eventually interrupted our peace. We still had two more days in our trip, but I already knew I would leave Taiwan feeling a bit like Sanmao, a scribbling traveler who had sprung for dessert first.
