Meme: Lucas Rides the NYC Subway

Who is Lucas, and why is his face plastered everywhere on ads in the New York City subway?

Valleywag wonders if Lucas, an Asian male who looks to be in his 20s/30s, should be representative of the 21st-century Everyman. Their conclusion, though, is No. Is it because Lucas is Asian?

Lucas buys a round.

Lucas does yoga.

Lucas rides the subway.

Lucas loves NYC.

Lucas likes to dance.

Lucas pays rent.

Lucas likes magic.

Lucas uses Venmo.

Sleuthing on LinkedIn, we’ve found that Lucas is “real”: he works at Venmo, a payment technology startup in New York City. (Here’s his LinkedIn.) And we found that “Lucas is a native New Yorker who loves his flip flops, NPR and milk (except skim, because it is really just white water). He is an aspiring climber and burger addict” from Venmo’s website. In the meantime, the netizens in New York City, at least those who have jobs requiring riding the subway, have taken note of him.

Again, on Valleywag, some folks show that they have some serious anger issues:

But, I think Venmo’s real objective is to make Lucas into an internet meme, which may actually be working. By the way, Lucas is cute, don’t you think?

Let’s flip it around and ask: what would happen on the internet if Lucas, instead of being an attractive Asian man, is a pretty Asian woman?

Images via Venmo

Going on a Guide Tour? Think Again!

The Asian Tourists – that trope of visor-wearing, peace-sign-picture-taking, bus riding, leisuring group – are no more charming in Asia than they are anywhere else. Like pigeons, they’re generally passive and nice, until put into a setting where they have to fight for food – or perhaps souvenirs and middle-of-the-road picture spots. Led for seven days through the Kansai region in Japan on a guided tour, I learned about the industry that produces this particular type of irksome consumer, and why I will never go on a guided tour again.

In my trip with SuperValueTours, a professional and well-liked company, I saw the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, and Kobe. We traveled by bullet train and bus, spending a substantial fraction of our daytimes in air-conditioned transit to and from tourist locations. As grandiose and historic were the sites of the Daibutsu Buddha statue, Kiyomizu temple, and Nijo Castle, we walked the path of drained, insipid uniformity.

It was the same in each location: our tour guide would lead us to an establish tori gate, sake brewery, or bamboo forest occupied with a host of tourists and middle-school students. We shuffle through the funneled walkway to observe, take pictures, and receive information through a guide or earpiece. At the end of the tour, we were given a small amount of time to “explore and relax” on our own, which meant looking at different souvenir stands selling identical post cards and plastic memorabilia.

Baaaaaaaah

The most shameless episode of my trip took place touring the Golden Pavilion, a temple in Kyoto covered in gold leaf. It was a spectacle to behold, as was the clamor of tourists trying to get a decent picture. On the side of the walkway, a stone pot was surrounded by vague idols and covered with coins. People gathered close to the fence, digging in their purses and pockets to throw money into the bowl. In my earpiece, the tour guide said, “Somebody once put that bowl there. A person started throwing coins, and other people followed. There is no meaning to it.”

For a business that is based on the “consumption of others,” the interchange of culture occurred on mostly superficial levels. There were few opportunities to speak with the people outside of an empowered-guest/disempowered-host dynamic, and our tour guide, though genuinely kind, was primarily concerned with repeating the facts of historic sites than providing her perspective as a Japanese citizen.

The tourist industry markets the commodity of a history already-written and dead. It provides luxury hotels, choice meals, mass produced souvenirs, and the ability to keep an absolute distance from the authenticity of a place. It might not mean anything to you or anyone else, but as long as you throw your money their way, they’ll gladly take it.

While I found the tourist industry problematic, I nonetheless enjoyed my time in Japan. The cherry blossom trees, clean streets, stylish young people, and ramen were all fantastic to be a part of. The bustling urban landscape is one of the most unique in the world. I would simply recommend travelers to take time to plan their own trip, with space to explore and get lost, rather than buying one already commodified and prepackaged.

You are What You Eat: Of Steamed Buns, Pizza, and Politicians

Food seems to be a popular political tool for politicians across the globe. Of course, the type of food is the crucial factor here: if one wants to convey that he stands with the people, as politicians are oft to do, he will choose a common food. When ordinary people see the public figure eating ordinary food, it makes the figure more relatable and representative. Apparently, this applies to Chinese politics as much as Western politics.

While New York Mayor Bill de Blasio undergoes scrutiny for his selection of utensils, the Chinese media and online forums exploded with admiration and praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to a Beijing restaurant last month. During this surprise visit, Mr. Xi reportedly stood in line and paid for his own buns, reiterating his political platform as a “leader of the people”. In the Qingfeng Steamed Dumpling Shop, Mr. Xi ordered pork and onion buns, green vegetables, and pig intestines for roughly $3.40. Criticisms for the visit arose as well, though they were overwhelmed by the tide of positive response to this rare demonstration of populism.

President Xi enjoying an everyman’s lunch

While American politicians commonly frequent popular local establishments in campaign events, this type of PR strategy is few and far between in China. With a long history of institutionalized separation between the masses and those in power, modern Chinese perceptions of their inaccessible political leaders often fringe on the superhuman. For locals, President Xi’s visit instantly canonized his order, with the dishes and the Beijing eatery becoming popular subjects for tourism.

Last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio had markedly different reactions from his recent restaurant visit. The new mayor of New York City was seen eating pizza at the popular Staten Island eatery, Goodfella’s Pizza. Instead of starting a new pizza craze, the mayor’s lunch visit sparked an online and media controversy.

Common criticisms cite Mayor de Blasio’s use of a fork to eat his pizza as unrepresentative of the New York style. After the visit, Mayor de Blasio’s food selections aren’t the focus of the subsequent tourism – his cutlery is. The restaurant owner proceeded to put the fork on display, with plans to auction off the utensil at a charity fundraiser.

Jon Stewart is on top of “Forkgate” with Mayor de Blasio

(Photo: Comedy Central)

It could be said that Mayor de Blasio’s gaffe derives in his “wrong” eating technique, one that was distinctively un-New York and not reflective of “the people,” while Mr. Xi adhered to common eating practices. Yet, a review of photos from the event revealed that Mr. Xi used chopsticks instead of his hands, which is the more common practice for Chinese people. Granted, politeness is a valid excuse for preferring one method to another, yet Mr. Xi encountered no criticisms of any kind over his choice of utensils.

For Mr. Xi, his lunch of steamed buns elevated the dish and the restaurant to a “presidential” level, while Mayor de Blasio was condemned for failing to adhere to the “ordinary” level. The differences in the reactions to Mr. Xi and Mayor de Blasio’s restaurant outings demonstrate fundamental differences in the sociopolitical conditions between China and the United States. Perhaps this shift in popular appeal marks a parallel shift in Chinese political norms. Mr. Xi’s bid to represent the Chinese people, or laobaixing, could be the beginning of a China that puts more weight on the opinions of her citizens, though this remains to be seen.

Main image by Tutou Jueren via China Digital Times

The Red Guard and the Landlady

From cultural revolution to rent collection…

It’s always a pleasant surprise when my landlady drops by unannounced at eight in the morning. I’m familiar with the early bird rap tap on my door by now, and the first thing I do before opening the door is put on the kettle. Sometimes she’s there to collect the rent. Sometimes it’s to check the heating came on, or to write down the electricity meter digits, or to switch off the water supply to the roof so it doesn’t freeze in the pipes during winter, twiddling with hidden knobs under the kitchen sink.

This time, rap tap tap, it was just to have a chat. She had ambushed my downstairs neighbor while he was still in bed, to collect rent he hadn’t yet prepared, having just got back from a trip. He said to give him an hour or so to shower and wait for the bank to open. So she came up one floor to pass the time at mine, and have a natter. Sixty-four-year-old Beijing landladies tend to assume that everyone begins their day as early as they do.

I live in a dazayuan, or “miscellaneous courtyard”, in the hutongs, inside one of a myriad of doors tucked away behind the street entrance. Mine is on the third and top floor of a compact new building inside, which was knocked up in the summer of 2012, just before I moved in. I’ve written about my landlady before (Tales from the Hutong) and I like her. She’s friendly, trustworthy, and hasn’t hiked up the rent yet. In that respect, given some horror stories from Cuju bar just down the hutong, I’m lucky. She’s also relatively willing to talk about her life – and I’m by nature nosy.

I was still in my pajamas when she knocked (thick winter cottons, fortunately) and threw on a ratty dressing gown for decency’s sake. She stubbed out her cigarette in the narrow stairwell that connects up to the roof, and kicked off her sneakers before coming in. It wouldn’t do to get ash or dirt on her property.

The first thing which happens when my landlady visits, as I am well used to, is a short survey of what I’ve done with the place. A new shelf, a painting on the wall, different fish in the tank – any change is commented on with either “hao” (good) or “bu hao” (not good). No further explanation is offered, and her criteria for judgment are ever a mystery. This time she asked what the contraption behind the sofa was. I said it was a movie projector, and pointed at the blank wall opposite it. After a nerve-racking pause, she said “hao“.

Looking to fill the silence, which she was more comfortable in than I was, I showed her some photos of my family back in Oxford. As usual, we talked about my romantic prospects – she’s keen to see me settle down with a nice Chinese girl, and reminded me with a hand on my shoulder that it’s good to marry early, “or else when you’re old who will you have to give your money to?” I changed the topic and asked after her newest grandson, Chen Jiaming, who will be one next week and to whom I gave an English name (Jamie).

We talked about young Chinese today, something I’m always interested in hearing older generations on. “They haven’t eaten bitterness,” she replied, a familiar refrain. “They just think about eating, drinking, smoking, clothes.” The kids these days – if they weren’t kenlaozu (the “bite the old tribe”, living off their parents) they were yueguangzu, spending all their monthly wages. And then she started talking about her own youth.

A Red Guard, China, circa 1967

Auntie Wang (as she likes me to call her) was born in the spring of 1949, and grew up together with the People’s Republic of China. Her family is from Jiangtai in northeast Beijing, an area which is now home to the fashionable 798 art district and the expensive Lido hotel. Back then, it was mostly farmland, and she helped her parents to plant and harvest wheat each year.

Her memories of those years were of hard times. Her family was very poor, she said, and could not afford enough wool for new clothes. She was pulled out of school during the famine of the Great Leap Forward (Auntie Wang is illiterate, as I had discovered to my embarrassment when we were first looking at our contract), and said she had very little to eat. When I ask further, she simply said, “Let’s not talk about it” (bie tile). As a teen, she joined the Red Guards and cut short her hair, which then reached her waist. She never grew it out again.

I asked Auntie what she did as a Red Guard. She waved vaguely in the direction of the hutongs to the south. “We struggled against landlords.” They would hang heavy wooden signs over the landlords’ necks, denoting them as capitalists, and make them take the “airplane” (feiji) position. That means body bent forwards from the waist at a right angle, arms back stiff and straight behind you, each hand clasping the other. Then… da si tamen. Beat them to death.

It was said in the same tone, with no special weight. If she saw the shock in my eyes, she didn’t let on. Auntie had all but directly admitted participating in murder, but to her it was just another part of the story of her life, told to pass the time while we waited. I didn’t say anything.

So she just went on. She remembered Zhou Enlai’s death, in January 1976, and how everyone cried. She remembered Mao Zedong’s death, nine months later, and how that was not so sad – the people, she said, remembered how poor they had been in those years, how his rule impacted their lives. The Cultural Revolution ended, and in 1978, at the age of 29, she married. She met her husband through a friend’s introduction – he was 35. The space I was living in was his, and when he died four years ago, she inherited it from him.

Now she was old, and forgetting things. The changes of the last decades were fast. Her two comments on China today were how expensive health care is, and that there are too many cars. In the evenings, she said, she couldn’t remember what she did that day. But the more distant past was still clear.

I saw an opening to make the obvious point. “The changes really are big,” I said. “Before, you were struggling against landlords. And now you’re a landlady…”

“No, I’m not,” Auntie said, simply. “I’m not a landlady, I just collect your rent.”

The thought was alien to her, rejected simply and with ease. She was a landlady, of course. I had seen her name on the property deed. But whenever I would hand her a fat envelope of rent cash, I had also felt her unease. I had figured it was because of prejudices against the landlord class ingrained during the Mao years. I had not thought through all that might have entailed.

We chatted some more, and then my neighbour knocked on the door, back from the bank. Auntie Wang put on her sneakers and went downstairs, telling me she would drop in again sometime with the rest of her family, to show me little Jamie. I said I would be sure to be up early, in case.

***

China is, of course, full of stories like this. Everyone over middle age has one. I find it difficult to connect the broader horrors of the Cultural Revolution as we read about it to those people, whether they were victims or perpetrators – and the line between the two, I suspect, is not so clear. I’m also fascinated by the collective amnesia that allows society to put such recent crime behind it and go on.

But the individual acts and their repercussions are still there in living memory. Just the other month, an eighty-year-old woman told me and a friend that she was sent to Sichuan for hard labor for ten years, along with her three sons, all because her husband was from a “bad family background”, with Qing dynasty officials in his bloodline. The author Yu Hua describes, in China in Ten Words, how as a schoolboy he and his vigilante classmates ambushed a young peasant who was illicitly selling food coupons, pushed him to the ground and hit him over the head with bricks until he was bloody.

I have so many questions for my landlady I didn’t ask, from somewhere between shyness and politeness. To face up to a past like that, whether out of trauma or shame or both, surely is unimaginably hard – let alone to a generation who has no understanding of those times, such as your children’s (and you certainly wouldn’t share it with a foreigner). Does her daughter know what she did? Will Jamie?

My distance from it all means there’s little comment I can give. I don’t feel I have the right to judge Auntie Wang, or rather that any sense of disapproval is muted, as if a dull banging behind heavy insulation. I still like her. What I do feel is ever deeper respect for Liu Boqin, a former Red Guard from Shandong province who apologized to his victims in a Chinese magazine last summer. He named nine people in particular, some of whom he has tracked down to apologize to in person. He’s in his early sixties, so like Auntie, he was in his teens during those years. Here’s what he wrote:

“I want to apologize to all victims and their families to obtain psychological relief. An open letter is simple and clear. [...] I was naive, easily bamboozled, and never distinguished good from bad. [...] As I grow older, I have a more profound understanding of the sins of the Cultural Revolution. I cannot forget what I’ve done wrong.”

*

Another, more recent apology from the Cultural Revolution, from someone higher up, here (in NYT, so behind the wall). For a personal perspective of what those early years were like I can’t recommend highly enough Red Guard: The Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-Ai (hat tip to Rana Mitter) as a blow-by-blow account – so to speak – from someone in the thick of it, rather than the broad brush strokes of history books.

This story originally appeared on the Anthill.

The Invisible Culture War: Media Importation in China

Basically every BBC Sherlock fan knows that Season 2 is back. Fortunately, the Chinese audience were the first outside the U.K. to see the drama on Youku (the Chinese version of Youtube) only a few hours after its Wednesday night premiere.

Sherlock, a modern interpretation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s influential detective short stories, fascinates millions of Chinese fans with its unique narrative complexity, incredibly charming yet obnoxious characters, and elaborate camerawork and animation.

Benedict Cumberbatch as the fluffy-haired detective and Martin Freeman as the “What! How?” straight man

Having recognized the tremendous market potential for Sherlock Holmes, Youku Tudou purchased the license for more than a billion yuan (about US$165 million) in order to combat rampant internet piracy with their own high-quality and timely foreign media online broadcasts.

“The BBC will directly provide us with official Chinese language subtitles… which is a first for a British drama released over Youku Tudou,” Zhu Xiangyang, Youku Tudou’s Chief Content Executive, explained. “After a review process where the site’s internal team confirms there are no problems with the video or the subtitles, the episode can immediately be released, and the whole process takes about four hours only.”

Of course, there’s more to the story. From 2010 to 2013, the total amount of American dramas shown on Youku surged, maintaining the increasing rate of viewership at an exponential level. As the largest and most comprehensive Chinese online database of Western media, Youku Tudou monopolized licenses of 25 English-language dramas – viewership during the premiere of 2 Broke Girls’ Season 3 reached 4 million, while the number of people who tuned in for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was 5 million.

For Chinese online video platforms, foreign dramas equal cash cows. After the State Administration of Radio Film and Television’s effective practice of wiping out online piracy, video websites seized the unprecedented opportunity of huge residual demand and built consumer loyalty by synchronizing more popular American and British dramas.

Gossip Girls in China

Though the price of each episode has risen (from roughly $20,000 to $120,000 yuan) due to fierce competition between different websites, it’s still a drop compared to advertising revenue. Apart from the huge audience, English-language TV dramas also effectively “catch” the eyeballs of the particular consumer segment most desired by advertisers: a typical viewer is a white-collar or an undergraduate student, who is generally well-educated and occupies a relatively higher position on the social ladder. The cultural scheme of targeting the right consumer group proved successful – in 2010, the estimated total revenue generated by the media importation was 1 billion, with future prospects was even more promising.

Nevertheless, though the online market is welcoming, Chinese government has “globalphobic” policies regarding other mediums. Due to the strict content restrictions on television, currently no Chinese TV channels broadcast American television dramas or shows.

On one hand, the general public might not respond well to the unfamiliar lives of people living on another continent – after all, China itself is a gigantic country with a lot happening domestically. On the other hand, an attempt to import Desperate Housewives on CCTV-8 proved a hilarious failure due to weird Chinese dubbing and the scrubbing of all sexual or violent scenes – the plot didn’t make any sense after editing. As well, other Asian countries, such as Korea, have their respective cultural protectionist policies in place to avoid western cultural domination.

The gauntlet’s thrown and trodden upon: the invisible culture war’s already begun.

Main image via NPR

My Bizarre First Night in Shanghai

“Your flight will leave in the morning. The desk opens back up at 6 a.m. Come back tomorrow,” said the attendant at the check-in counter. He looked back down at his computer, clearly not wanting to talk to me anymore. Someone missing his or her flight to elsewhere must have been a common occurrence for this employee, because he didn’t seem the least bit apologetic or concerned.

Defeated, I found a place to sit down in Pudong International Airport. I was going to Fuzhou for a few weeks before I started my summer study abroad program in Shanghai, but my flight from New York to Shanghai had been delayed, so I missed my 10:05 p.m. flight to Fuzhou. After an older man came to bring me my luggage, it finally hit me: I was alone in a foreign country with only my bags to keep me company.

Shanghai PVG – everything looks calmer at night

I felt miserable about my situation. I could make outgoing calls with my phone, but by the time I’d gone through immigration and customs, cleared things up with my airline, and changed my tickets for the next morning, it was roughly midnight, and no one was picking up my calls. I had no electrical adapter, so I couldn’t charge it, and it was running low on battery power. On top of everything else, I was exhausted from my long flight and couldn’t believe that my first night ever in China would be spent in an airport.

Frustrated and anxious, I pulled out my laptop in hopes of getting on the airport wi-fi, but since I didn’t have a Chinese phone number to receive the passcode, I had no access. At that point, I had no idea what to do with myself. Most of the people in my vicinity, also in transit and waiting their early-morning flights, had already started sleeping on the seats. Unable to do anything, I stared helplessly at my laptop screen.

It was then that a man (I’ll call him Airport Guy) sitting close by turned to me. “Do you have internet access? How did you get it?” he asked, in Chinese.

He was an older, average-looking Chinese man, maybe in his mid-to-late thirties, slightly balding and wearing glasses. In my flawed Mandarin, I told Airport Guy why I couldn’t get internet access. I expected him to go back to whatever he was doing, but his curiosity must’ve been piqued because he proceeded to ask me personal questions. When he found that I wasn’t Chinese but Korean-American, he became excited: he loved speaking English, and he started to tell me about his life in a mixture of Chinese and English. Airport Guy worked for a company that did business in Ghana, so he often traveled back and forth between the two countries. He was on his way back from Africa, but his flight to Xi’an was in the morning.

“Do you want to see my pictures of Ghana?” he eagerly asked. I was unbelievably tired and just wanted to be left alone, but to be polite, I agreed, expecting him to show me a few pictures. Little did I know, he presented his entire photo collection of his travels in Ghana and explain each one in detail to me.

After suffering through the slideshow, I got up and told him that I needed to go find a place to exchange my American cash for Chinese currency. That didn’t deter Airport Guy, though.

When Anna Met Airport Guy

“I’ll help you!” he exclaimed as he jumped up from his seat. Despite my insistence that I was fine, he put all of my things with his bags on a cart and guided me to the currency exchange machines. I was exasperated with this eccentric man, but he was friendly to me, so I didn’t have the heart to be rude and tell him to go away.

Then, the night took a strange turn. When I was done, he bought me food and water, even though I told him it was unnecessary. Continuing to carry my bags, he moved us to a location a bit farther away from the others: I eventually thanked him and started eating my first meal in China, a few tea eggs and a bottle of water.

“You look tired. Do you want to go to a hotel? We could get a room,” Airport Guy asked, while I was drinking.

At this question, I almost choked on my water, but I managed to muster out a “No”.

“Well, then you can sleep on my lap or my shoulder if you want to rest,” he replied, gesturing to his body.

In response, I quickly made up an excuse that I was too nervous to sleep: I wanted to be alert and awake when the ticketing counter opened up. In actuality, I would’ve loved to sleep a few hours, but with this creepy stranger who had my bags hostage beside me, I didn’t dare fall asleep.

Airport Guy began to pull out things from his luggage: he started playing some of the traditional Chinese musical instruments he had, right there in the middle of the airport, much to my shock. Undeterred by the glares aimed at him from the nearby people he woke up with his flute, he smiled as he played a song on each instrument, explaining the intricacies of each one.

Ok for a concert if you know what you’re getting into; not ok at an airport

“Is this guy for real?” I thought to myself, in complete disbelief at how weird he was.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get more uncomfortable, Airport Guy proceeded to gift me the very instruments he’d played. I begged him not to do so – my luggage was too heavy, but he refused to take them back. I convinced him to give me two, instead of his whole collection; however, Airport Guy still wasn’t satisfied, so he gave me a wooden wall decoration from Ghana and key chains from an airport in Dubai. I didn’t want to accept his gifts, but he wouldn’t put them away. Unprepared for his generosity, I had absolutely nothing to present in return except for food: he got a bag of Quadratini, a can of tuna, sour cream & onion Pringles, and peach gummy rings, all he gleefully accepted.

“Oh, tonight has been like the song ‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapton. It’s been such a beautiful night,” Airport Guy beamed to me. Unfamiliar with this song at the time, I gave no response, but I still couldn’t help but feel that this man was in some way delusional: the night had not been wonderful or beautiful in any way.

Later, when Airport Guy and I finally parted ways for our respective flights, he insisted on taking a picture with me with such enthusiasm that a couple of people gathered around and stared at me, trying to figure out if I was someone important or famous. With my blood-shot eyes and dark eye circles behind my glasses, my wrinkled clothes, and greasy, unkempt hair under a baseball cap, I couldn’t have looked less like a celebrity, so their fascination quickly turned into bemusement at the man who was so passionately taking pictures with me.

In excellent disguise? Korean actress Jun Ji-Hyun mobbed at an airport

As soon as I got on my flight to Fuzhou and left Pudong International Airport, I passed out on the plane, finally free of Airport Guy. Though I was thankful to him for his kindness, I had been very uncomfortable (and creeped out) the entire night. Fortunately, later on in the summer, I got to experience far better nights in Shanghai, but I will always remember Airport Guy and the bizarre first night in China I spent with him.

How I Met My Mother

Before traveling to Taiwan last year, I knew only a few things about my birth mother Susie (her American name). She was born in 1950 and grew up in Tainan in the southwest of Taiwan. In the 1970s, she immigrated to Las Vegas, and she worked briefly as a card dealer at a casino. While visiting Taipei in 1980, she met an engineer on a British ship; he would become my birth father. She gave birth to me in Las Vegas on April 9, 1981, and a few weeks later, she put me up for adoption.

Susie’s passport photo in 1975, when she was 25

In September 2012, my start-up 1000memories was acquired by Ancestry.com, setting off a chain of events that would lead me to Taiwan to look for Susie. Suddenly, family history was my full-time job, and I felt inspired to learn more about my birth mother. I petitioned the Family Court of Clark County, Nevada, to open my adoption records. The Court granted my request, revealing Susie’s last name.

Susie’s last name led me to her younger brother and sister in Las Vegas, whom I found by cold calling numbers in an online telephone directory. A DNA test verified our relationship. Susie’s siblings had lost touch with her in the 1980s, and they guessed that she had moved back to Taiwan. Her brother gave me a passport photo of her when she was 25 years old, as well as an immigration document with her name written in Chinese, her birth date, and Taiwanese identification number.

When I left Las Vegas, boarding the first of three flights for Taiwan, I had many questions. Was Susie still alive, and if so, was she in Taiwan? What did she do? Did she have a family? Why had she lost touch with her siblings? How would she and I feel if we met? What would happen afterward? I imagined many different stories and scenarios -  but not what was about to happen.

I arrived in Taipei at night on Wednesday, October 23. Within 24 hours, I hit a dead end. An official at the local government office in Taipei told me that Susie had left for the United States on March 25, 1981, two weeks before I was born. The Taiwanese government had no record of her ever returning.

I spent the next few days exploring Taipei, taking long runs to help recover from jet lag, and contemplating my next move. I called Susie’s siblings, but they didn’t know more than what they had already told me. I reached out to a few private investigators in Taiwan. They suggested I go on Taiwanese TV to tell my story (apparently, many Taiwanese-Americans have been reunited with lost family members this way). Disappointed, I wondered if it would be more fruitful for me to shift my search from Susie to my birth father Thomas Llewellyn Hughes—who, I suspect, remains in Asia if he’s still alive at 83.

Then, on Sunday, I had a breakthrough. Susie’s oldest brother David called me. David also lives in Las Vegas, but we had not met because of an ongoing dispute between siblings. Despite barriers in communication (I do not speak Mandarin, and David has an accent and unique diction in English), I explained that I was in Taiwan looking for Susie. Within a couple hours, he emailed me an address in Hualien, a rural county on Taiwan’s remote eastern coast.

I asked for help from the Westin Taipei’s concierge, a young woman named Alice. Without offerings details, I gave Alice the address, and told her I was looking for a woman named Susie born on May 3, 1950. Alice googled the address, called the number she found, and spoke for a few minutes in Mandarin with the person who answered. After hanging up, she turned to me and said:

They say there is a woman there named Susie. She is approximately the same age as the woman you are looking for, but they cannot confirm her birth date because they do not know what her birth date is. Are you sure this is the right place? I do not think this is the place you are looking for. It is called Farmers Hospital. It is for the homeless.

The next morning, Alice and I met at Taipei Main Station at 7 a.m. Alice, who had graduated from the University of San Francisco a few years earlier, offered to accompany me as a translator on her day off. On the four-hour train ride, Alice and I talked about life in San Francisco, and she taught me how to count from 1 to 10 in Mandarin.

Mostly, I wondered if the Susie I would meet that day would be my birth mother — and, if so, what it would be like to meet her. We traveled down the mountainous eastern coast of Taiwan, between the sea and the green mountains, past the municipal capital Hualian, past the Taroko Gorge where most passengers got off, past the rivers and rice fields of southern Hualien County, until eventually we arrived in the sleepy farming village of Yuli. I felt a little bit like Marlow in an idyllic version of Heart of Darkness: nervous and excited in a foreign land.

We took a 15-minute taxi from the train station to the hospital outside of town. I left my suitcase with the security guard out front.

The women’s building at Farmers Hospital in Yuli

When we entered the women’s building of the hospital, Susie was standing in the middle of the TV room. There were perhaps 10 other women, whom the nurse quickly ushered out. All of them, including Susie, were wearing orange sweat suits. I noticed that Susie was short and chubby, and her black and white hair, cut short like a man’s, stuck up wildly in the back -  like mine does when I have bedhead.

“Hi,” I said. She smiled but didn’t say anything. The nurse explained through Alice that Susie is nearly deaf, and she can only hear if you shout Mandarin into her left ear.

We sat down on the green plastic couch, and we tried to have a conversation. Shouting into a 63-year-old stranger’s left ear felt awkward, so Alice and I “spoke” to Susie by writing Chinese characters on white sheets of paper. Susie read them and then responded with short, simple answers.

Susie and I on the green plastic couch

I asked Susie how she was doing, and how long she had lived in the hospital. I asked her questions about her family, her children, and her past. Her memory was hazy, and she could only remember the vaguest of details. She didn’t know how long she had been there. Her father worked in the Air Force. She went to high school in Tainan. She had lived in Denver and Las Vegas a long time ago. She had two sons and also a daughter. She could not remember her daughter’s name.

Convinced by our physical resemblance and similarities in our stories, the nurse began to tell Susie that I was her son. Susie shook her head and waved her hand in disbelief. The nurse kept repeating in Susie’s left ear and pointing at me, “This is your son!” Susie could not and did not believe it.

I wrote down on a sheet of paper in big capital letters, “FRANK HUGHES.” A few months earlier, I had learned from my original birth certificate that Frank Hughes was my original name. I showed the paper to Susie and pointed at the words.

One of the sheets of paper that Alice and I wrote on

“My son,” said Susie matter of factly. “Sì Jiǔ.”

Alice reminded me that Si Jiǔ means “four nine” in Mandarin. I realized that Susie called me Si Jiǔ to remember my birth date  - April 9.

“I am Frank Hughes. I am Sì Jiǔ. I was born on April 9, 1981, in Las Vegas.”

Susie grinned widely, almost as if I had embarrassed her. She shook her head and waved her hand, and then she turned to the nurse and said: “My son would not visit from the United States. Plus, he is too handsome to be my son.”

The next day, I returned to the hospital to visit Susie and meet her social worker Sui-Ching. Mei, the warm-hearted, 60-year-old proprietor of my B&B, replaced Alice as my translator.

The social worker showed us Susie’s medical records. “Schizophrenia” jumped out in English — no translation required.

According to Sui-Ching, Susie was in good physical health but suffered from mental illness. Her symptoms had improved over the years, and her hallucinations had become less severe and less frequent. Unlike some of her roommates, she could feed herself and dress herself.

“How long has she been here?” I asked.

Sui-Ching explained that Susie was picked up off the street and admitted to a sister hospital in Taipei as an “unknown person” more than 16 years ago, sometime during the 1980s or 1990s. In 1997, the hospital in Taipei burned down, and Susie was transferred to Yuli. Unfortunately, nothing else about her was known because all medical records were destroyed in the fire, and her attending physician had passed away.

I spent the rest of the week in Yuli, visiting Susie once a day. I tried to think of activities that would make our communication deficiencies less apparent. Susie made it easy. She smiled a lot, and she seemed genuinely pleased that a friendly stranger had come to visit from the United States.

FaceTime with Mei, Sui-Ching, Susie, David, and me

We took walks around the peaceful grounds of the hospital. One day, her social worker and I took Susie to get her hearing checked at a clinic in Yuli. I wanted to buy her hearing aids, but Susie refused because they made the world too noisy. Another day, we used the internet connection at my B&B to make a FaceTime call to her older brother David. They hadn’t seen each other for 35 years. Susie didn’t recognize him at first, but after about 15 minutes, she understood who he was. She could not hear him, so she decided to write on a sheet of paper in Chinese, “I am happy,” and she showed it to him.

My first Polaroid

Each day, I showed her pictures on my MacBook Air of my evolution from baby, to boy, to adolescent, to adult, to the present day. I started with the first picture of me ever, a blurry Polaroid that Susie had taken herself when I was only a couple weeks old. I thought that through pictures, she might realize that I was her son. She never did.

At the end of the week, many questions remained unanswered. What triggered Susie’s schizophrenia and when? Did mental illness influence her decision to put me up for adoption? Why does the government have no record of her return to Taiwan? What happened to her in Taipei, and how did she end up on the street? Who and where are my half-brother and half-sister? Will I ever meet them or Thomas?

I wasn’t going to leave Yuli with these answers, but I did want to leave something behind for Susie. I wrote a short note, and Mei help me translate:

Your son Frank Hughes is very grateful to you for giving birth to him and for putting him up for adoption. He is now 32 years old and has had a very good life — loving family, great education, fulfilling career. He is happy and proud to be your son.

I also made copies of two photographs — the Polaroid of me as a baby, and a picture of us together from the visit. Sui-Ching laminated the letter and the photographs together so that Susie could keep them safe.

Maybe one day Susie will see the note and photos and realize who I am.

The author thanks Lauren Ladoceour, Beth Huneycutt, Ashley Huneycutt, Felicia Curcuru, and Rudy Adler for reading drafts of this memoir.

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This article was originally published on Medium .