Journeys | The Peaceful Road of the East to Learning Chinese (走到和平東路去學中文)

Those who are familiar with the geography of Delhi, and the many cities built, abandoned, and re-inhabited over millennia by different empires and dynasties, can think of Taipei City as the older town around which an enveloping cordon of New Taipei rises and falls with the topography of the mountains that allure a hiker through the Taipei grand trail.

New Delhi is the newest city, so is New Taipei. Established by the British to house the capital of their empire in India which then also included Burma, and several emirates of the Gulf, including the port of Aden in Oman, New Delhi is a portion of the Delhi state that includes the older Delhis: the ruins of Tughlaqabad, gardens and tombs of the Lodis, early Mughal Humayun’s tomb complex and eventually Shahjahanabad of famous Chandni Chowk and Jama Masjid, and the imperial Red Fort where we unfurl the Tricolor to the music of Jana Gana Mana to remember we are independent lest we forget.

Taipei City rests in the valley of mountains visible at the receding edges of many of its streets and avenues. From my quarantine in San Xia district of New Taipei City, I moved in to the International House of Taipei in Xindian (ihouse). The rapid transit takes one to Xindian station, where one exits and boards the Green-9 bus up a steeply rising hill that houses the ihouse. In the foyer is a photograph from half a century ago when the hostel was stationed in Da’an, the Lutyens of Taipei?

Like Virginia Woolf’s dream, I have a room of my own and a small stipend that she deems necessary for a life of the mind. Windows frame the high rises undulating with the terrain, topped by red lights that burn, grow bright and dim, go out and glow again throughout the night. Staring at that sight, over the next few months, I would sleep like a babe cradled in the lap of Taipei.

Hilltop Window into the Valley

As evenings rolled, I would mingle with the residents which included a retired official from Jordan (I never knew who he really was, and frankly I treasured the mystery over any revelation), a PhD student from Iran, language learners from Japan and Korea, an old woman from Russia and an AI researcher from England on a break after a grueling few years at a startup. I would grow to sit in their company, sip Iranian tea brewed in a Persian teapot or an English breakfast tea amidst fume of smoke and talks about their views of Chinese language, the city that became their home and the homes they had left behind.

In the mornings I would shower, put on clothes that I bought with time, a maroon red Chinese collar shirt, and trousers, and stand opposite the ihouse entrance where the G-9 buses stopped. Others would be waiting with me, students and old folks dependent on the kindness of a motor bus to ferry them down the sharp slopes and steep heights of the hill.

The Sun Also RIses

Climbing up and down the ihouse I learnt that three different drivers ran G-9 route bus, all middle-aged with faces that shew the signs of pleasures and dissatisfaction of a human life. A chubby faced bald one was particularly upset with the world. He would never halt the bus where you stood, and screech the brakes either a few metres ahead of you or behind, and floor the gas as soon as you got on. Some pleasure he derived from unstable bodies clutching hard for life and get tossed about.

Another was a kinder soul, head full of hair, sharp and smooth square face, and a kind smile in his eyes. He would wait until the frail legs of the old had carried them to an empty seat and perched. First time I boarded the bus, I did not yet have a YoYo Card, or easy card as it is translated in English. It is a multi-purpose thing you could load with money to pay public transit fares and shop at seven-elevens and family marts.

I was short on change, clueless about the social cues of riding a bus, the driver was kind enough to let me on and gesture what I needed to do but lacked the words to express and understand. All the seats were taken and the bus swerved hard on hairpin-esque bends. My palms burned red, one from holding the armrest hanging from the ceiling and and the othr grabbing hard on some pole for my life to avoid an unfair collision into someone. An announcement ran every few seconds, its music is now an earworm that rings in my mind from time to time. I knew its music immediately but meaning seeped in slowly.

The MRT line from Xindian took me via Qizhang, passing through Gongguan where those destined for Taiwan National University (Taiwan Da Xue) alighted, down to Guting station, where I got off, exited from gate number 5 and walked down Heping Dong Lu (The Peaceful Street of the East) towards Da’an park, looking at the shops selling buns, a few banks and a Louisa café, a stamp maker and convenience stores littered every few hundred metres, the athletics grounds of National Taiwan Normal University before I arrived at the crossroads of Shida Night Market. On the left lay my house of learning, Mandarin Training Center, with Corinthian column at the entrance, at its opposite was the glass face modernism of the university library rising nine stogeys high.

Around the building that housed MTC, you would be mistaken to presume that you were in a heterotopia of denizens of the world who were born speaking disparate tongues and all gathered here to learn Chinese, or the National Language, as it is called.

Imagine my surprise when I learnt that there is no language called Chinese in Chinese. There is a language of the nation (Guo Yu), a language of the Hua people (Hua Yu), language of the Han people (Han Yu), language of the middle state, literally a city with walls (Zhong Wen), and the widespread tongue (Putong Hua), but nothing called the Chinese language. Which of these languages was I going to learn?

Upstairs I went, using the lift that became crowded and slowed down to a halt at every floor during the start and end of a Chinese class. On the sixth floor, I exited and collected my student ID card, and further upstairs I climbed to the eighth floor to be in person with my teacher and classmates who I had only seen and heard through the flatness of a zoom screen.

It is no exaggeration to say that I had the kindest Laoshi, and certainly I was not a diligent student. How she would drag my friction loving feet into the hall of Chinese characters only she knows. All I know is that I made friends with a few characters at first, ni (你) and hao (好), shen me (什麼), na li (哪裡), and holding on to their fingers I learnt to go to the seven-eleven downstairs at the end of the class, buy a triple cheese sandwich and utter, ‘Qing, bang wo wei bo,’ please microwave this sandwich, and say Xie Xie (謝謝)。