The week before arriving in Taiwan, I traveled to four states, ate six mini United Airlines Biscoff cookies and walked over 140,000 steps. I chase adventure and opportunities to experience new places, meet new people, and try new things. I knew my summer plans needed to be in a completely unfamiliar environment that required quick problem-solving. When I challenge my brain, I feel most alive. But as much as I love exploring, the first two weeks of any trip challenge me the most. The slow moments of orientation, not having friends yet and not understanding my new environment flash nostalgic memories of the comforts of home. It always takes two weeks to make friends, find my footing, and establish the feeling of a home away from home. This slow time evokes my fear of standing still, wasting time in a place I’ve wanted to visit for so long.
I currently live in the land of Chinese idioms, big tales boiled down to a few characters. These shared narratives, like 望梅止渴 (gazing at plums to quench thirst), give shape to Mandarin and condense a feeling into words. This idiom reflects the longing for something that seems satisfying from afar but may not fulfill the expectations when experienced. When I adjust to new surroundings, I can’t explore at a whim, and as the idiom describes, I’m stuck longing for distant expectations. This is exactly the fear of standing still.
In my last week in Taiwan, Typhoon Gaemi devastates the area with horrific flooding and wind damage. The isolation of staying inside rekindles the homesickness I felt at the beginning of my trip. With little time left, I have a strong urge to make the most of my travel experience. The weather is completely out of my control; I reluctantly accept the realities of a typhoon ravaging the beautiful country I am eager to explore.
Stuck on the third floor of my homestay, I struggle to pass the time. The typhoon amplifies the sense that each day in Taiwan feels like a countdown until my next meal. After I ate 蛋餅, a Taiwanese pancake-egg omelet that my host family graciously made me, I needed three hours of activities before I could eat lunch. I started by listening to music, crafting, watching YouTube, cleaning my room and all my other quarantine activities. After a few hours, I sat in bed and contemplated why I could not rest peacefully like I had been able to in 2020. Why was time passing so slowly?
The main difference between quarantine and typhoon sheltering comes from the lack of connection. During quarantine, my house buzzed with my whole family ready for spontaneous game nights, baking challenges and long drives. During the typhoon, my host mother, brother and I isolate in our rooms to work. When we reunite at night to eat dinner, exhaustion exacerbates their ability to switch from their mother language Taiwanese to the Mandarin I am learning. My loneliness intensifies in our misunderstandings.
On a normal day, I am only at my host family’s house to sleep. I leave the house at 5 am for my university’s karate club that I joined then go directly to the lab. I often return home at 10-11 pm after eating dinner and adventuring with local friends. The added barrier of my host mother’s damaged hearing and preference to speak Taiwanese keeps us at a distance. Although I rarely see them, we maintain our connection through small gift-giving. I leave paper flowers around the house, and when I return home from lab, there are small treats and plastic jewels dispersed across my room like a treasure hunt.
My host family and I at Kenting National Park.
Instead of paper flowers, to overcome a similar challenge of connecting with my lab mates, I surprise them with Trader Joe’s snacks and help them complete lab tasks through the night. Working at a lab is a completely immersive Chinese experience, and being in an environmental engineering lab requires even more nuanced and technical language. I spend hours after lab translating terms like “activated carbon,” “massspectroscopy,” “isotope” and other scientific words whose English meanings I don’t even fully understand. As much as I try to keep up, I am always a step behind.
In addition to lab work, my lab partners and I eat most meals out together: breakfast after karate club, lunch after group meeting and dinner when we end our last experiments. Just like how my friends in the US and I eat lunch, we have very quick back-and-forth conversations that rapidly switch topics. I always struggle to follow their conversations and often feel isolated. To maintain our friendship, my lab mates and I creatively search for other ways to spend time together outside of the quick lunch talks and technical lab discussions, such as exploring Taiwan together. They are very excited to take me to their favorite restaurants, night markets and local shops.
Midnight ice cream with my friends at lab.
Our adventures halt during the typhoon as the whole city shuts down, and it is too windy to ride my bike to visit anyone. My support systems for overcoming isolation crumble against the strength of the typhoon. As I lay hopelessly bored, I realize my problem with sheltering inside is that I can’t maintain connection in the same way. I struggle inside because I have been lucky enough to find my footing in Taiwan. The more at home I feel with Taiwanese culture and around the love of my new friends, the harder it becomes for me to say goodbye. The typhoon in the last week of my summer abroad prepares me for how to maintain a connection from afar. How can I stay connected to the friends I have made when they are thousands of miles away? I can’t rely on FaceTime as I do with my friends in the US because I built my relationships here on shared adventures and our language barrier makes communication more challenging.
During the typhoon, I send friends short videos showing them random funny things I am doing, and they respond with their own videos. I hope we can continue to connect across the world despite the oceans and languages attempting to separate us.