Love in the Summertime
The bus ride from the first pool to the second pool always made me nauseous. I would sit in the very last row of the bus, past the schoolchildren in green-and-white striped uniforms and the old ladies in sun-hats with brims so wide I’d have to gently brush aside when walking up the narrow isle. I’d make my way to the very end of the bus and plop down onto my window seat, bobbling up and down with the rest of the passengers until a warm clot began rolling in the bottom of my stomach.
I’m guessing it was the long windings of Tienmu West Road that made the bus sway and wriggle like food pushing through the small intestine, or perhaps it was the warm glass of milk I had downed not too long before. Either way, the sickness in my stomach always caused a dull, dizzying migraine that softened my limbs and pinned me down onto the warm bus seat like a big, dumb sack of rice. I would rest my head on the window, but the vibrations of the moving bus would cause my head to thump against the glass, giving me irrational fears of brain damage, and the sunlight beaming through would always sting my eyes.
When the school year had ended, I didn’t think I would ever see him again. We were both the passive type, and that was my last year in that junior high school before my parents had sent me off to Cupertino. On the last day of school, he walked over to my seat, took my phone from my hand, and sent himself a message. That was the extent of his initiation. I told him my phone wasn’t connected to the school internet, so the message wouldn’t send, and he assured me that it would, as long as I kept the tab open until my phone was reconnected. I walked home that day with my phone in my hand, my eyes never leaving the screen, tapping at it every so often to make sure it stayed on until I got home.
That summer, I worked as Granduncle Fan’s pool cleaner. When my great grandfather passed, Granduncle Fan inherited a few of his properties that were scattered across Taipei and, for no particular reason, converted them into public pools. He probably just grew up without a pool, I joked when I texted him about Granduncle Fan’s pools. It was a joke because nobody in Taipei really grew up with a pool, at least not the type of pools Granduncle Tan built. As far as I knew, all the pools we had access to were in-door pools owned by local universities or gated within shabby community centers, and they were always crowded like pots of boiling dumplings. I could still hear the echoes of splashes when I really thought about it.
There were five pools in total, and they all looked the same. They were the kind that you’d see in American movies, a standalone pool in the middle of a neighborhood, always with a small office by its side and a life guard who wears a red hat and a slab of sunscreen on his nose. I won’t get into details of where exactly they were located, but they plotted out a bell-shaped curve around the city of Taipei, the furthest north being close to Taipei Veterans General Hospital. I woke up at six o’clock every morning and made my way around each of his pools.
The main task every day was raking out the debris from the pools. Granduncle Tan left me with a skimmer net at each location, and I’d lug it from his office to the pool, dragging it by the handle across all four corners. The handle extended to almost twice my height even when it was dipped to the bottom of the pool, so I looked miniature in comparison, like the rat in Ratatouille stirring the pot of chowder with a ladle. Twice did I launch myself into the pool trying to spoon up sunken trash. Granduncle Tan’s pools, unlike many other outdoor pools I’ve seen in the past, were never shaded by trees — there weren’t even any in the proximity — but I would always somehow still find scatters of leaves and branches in my skimmer net, as if I were raking foliage from a backyard. It was a phenomenon I could never understand.
Maybe kids snuck in branches in their swim trunks, he wrote in his text, though that would probably hurt a lot. I cackled at the image of a boy stuffing handful of branches into his Speedo. I didn’t have internet service on my phone back then, so I never checked it whenever I was out in the sun cleaning the pools. The only place that had internet was the poolside offices, and I would check for his messages as soon as I arrived.
My job wasn’t difficult, but the repetition of tasks from pool to pool, one day after another, was quite mind-numbing. Though I didn’t mind. I was always occupied with thoughts. After reading his texts, I would then spend the time while I cleaned thinking about my response. That was around the time when people first started using Facebook to message each other, and we still treated it like email, sending each other long, elaborative paragraphs, sporadically throughout the day instead of the rapid back and forth we do now. There was a certain preciousness to kind of message-exchange that I can’t quite put to words. I remember regurgitating and rehearsing my every thought before converting them into text, crafting each one of them with unnecessary care, but that could just be me. That would be disgusting, I said to him in my head as I scrubbed tiles on the bathroom floor, as if I were typing it out on my phone, I don’t want my skimmer to touch anything that’s been in the inside of a little boy’s pants.
Our conversation would go on in my head while I proceeded with my tasks. I imagined him following me around the pool, from the row of wooden lounge chairs to the shallow end where children splashed water at each other. I’d think of different ways to reply to his messages and imagine how he’d react in seeing mine, how he’d respond to every version I had in my head. You’re lucky Americans are bad at math, I imagined him saying when I asked about the preparatory math class his mother had enrolled him in, you would never have to go to these stupid classes like I do. Those classes were brutal. He spent four hours every morning that summer locked in a small classroom with thirty other students of the same age, scrawling through one test paper after another. White walls lined with mold, low ceiling with flickering fluorescent light. Sometimes the room would get so muggy that the windows would fog up. On Wednesdays, there would be a lecturer who struts into the classroom as soon as the clock strikes eight, and he would launch straight into lecture, catching the students by surprise. He would always wear these latex finger-cots that slipped on like a condom, he described to me in one of his texts, the guys sitting in the row behind me calls him Mr. Protection behind his back. Small quips like these would always send a little flutter to my chest. I would memorize them word for word and repeat them in my head as I wiped down the shower rooms and replaced the cartridge filters. My mind would sometimes be so consumed by these imaginary conversations that I wouldn’t even realize that I’d finished my tasks. I’d find myself, snapped back to reality, standing in the middle of a spotless locker-room or a tidy shed, unable to recall the motions of cleaning. It felt as if my body was on autopilot, and I was in a trance.
After cleaning every pool, I’d reply to his messages and head to the next stop. Granduncle Tan’s five pools were not close to each other, and some of them were actually quite out of the way. I had to take multiple forms of public transportation, transferring from bus to train then bus again just to trek from one pool to the other. It was a drag, but I don’t remember feeling irritated by the commute. I was too excited. By the time I get to my next stop, he would have already texted me back. I’d scamper from the metal gate door to the poolside office to check his messages, reading them through over and over, then repeat the whole cycle again.
Even though he was locked in for most of the day, he still managed to have a lot to share with me. He would tell me stories about his fellow classmates, or comrades, as he liked to call them, and their foolish mischiefs. One time, somebody in class downloaded a frequency generator on her phone and figured out a range that only young people could hear, so everyone in the class followed suit and used the app to cheat on their tests. There were beeping sounds tooting all over the room, he said in his text, but Mr. Protection just stood at his podium without batting an eye. He’d sometimes doodle on his test papers instead of actually taking them. Why does it matter? I already know all of this, he’d say when I scolded him for slacking, give me something I could draw. We couldn’t send each other pictures on our phones back then, so, even after he drew whatever I requested, he wasn’t able to show me. How am I supposed to know if they are any good? I’d say, to which he’d reply, they are, trust me, I’ll describe it to you. The elephant has two ears, two tusks, and two eyes…
I’d supply him with the things I observed throughout the day, and, though the people I described wouldn’t be as entertaining as those in his math class, they were not confined within four sweaty walls. I’d tell him about the old men who were as tan as pumpernickel, always swimming soundlessly early in the morning. I would spot them at the first and second pools since it would still be morning when I cleaned them. Around noon, I would be making my rounds at the third, which was always crowded with people. Families would congregate around this time, bringing with them snacks and lunchboxes which they often left behind. This baffled me because I always assumed that nobody liked to be in the sun, but I guess the coolness of the water cancelled out the blazing sunlight. I would always make the water temperature of the that pool a little lower than the rest. I didn’t want to have to scoop up cooked children from the pool with my skimmer. The third pool was always the most difficult to clean, since, every time I picked up a littered Juicebox, another one seemed to magically appear at the same spot. You should be able to fine them, he texted when I complained about the trash, write them tickets so they’d stop.
While he was constantly surrounded by people he knew, the people I interacted with all day were merely passing strangers. People who asked if there were extra bath towels. People who complained about the vending machine not working. People who requested shower soap and sunscreen. My interactions with them were always terse, if there were any at all. To be quite frank, I felt pretty lonely from time to time, especially when he was having a particularly exciting day, but I never told him about it. I didn’t want to rain on his parade. Those days, I felt like a narrator reading a picture book filled with watercolors, the public pools brushed over with luminous hues and the people captured in quick, thick strokes, details of their faces melding into gradients. Despite so, I still texted him throughout the day, updating everything that was happening even if nothing was really going on. We had developed a routine around each other’s daily schedules, nailing the exact time we’d receive texts from one another by the second with the precision and coordination of a pair of tango dancers.
Many years later, I would sometimes think back to that summer and try to recall some of our conversations. It amazed me how much we texted throughout those three months. How did we have so much to talk about? I wondered, as I sat across from my boyfriend of four and a half years at the dinner table, unable to come up with anything to say to him. What was going on in our minds at the time? Facebook saves all of your past messages, even the ones from decades ago, but I never dared to look back at any of them. They were easier kept in the form of memories, I guess. Perhaps the closeness between two people at that age was just being able to share with each other the things that occurred to us every day. I don’t remember ever having any desires for deeper rumination or articulations of thoughts. Simple transactions. Back and forth, without the burden of meaning. We just wanted to know what was going on in each other’s lives.
Something we talked a lot about that summer, this I do remember very clearly, was Granduncle Tan. As much as I worked on his properties every day, I had never actually seen him in person. On my first day of work, he left an envelope on the office desk, and, in it, was a four-page letter, back-to-back written in tiny inscriptions of all the tasks I had to complete at each pool and the instructions for each task. I almost couldn’t understand his writing. All of his instructions were written in pithy, incomplete sentences, and all of the sentences were concatenated into chunky paragraphs. “Wash shower curtain a week. Remember lock door. Shake door to lock. Keys in drawer.” He even drew diagrams for the temperature meters. I found it off-putting, but I was touched by his attentiveness.
When I told him about the eccentricities of Granduncle Tan, he acted as if he discovered a tableful of lavish dishes. Why didn’t he come to meet you? What does he do for a living? Why did he build those pools? I found his incessant questioning amusing. I didn’t think Granduncle Tan was all that special.
My mother told me that Granduncle Tan was an extremely reclusive man, which I found funny because he had eight kids. I’m guessing he didn’t become a hermit until he had them, I texted him. But Granduncle Tan wasn’t like those grumpy old men you’d see in movies. I knew this because he would always leave me an ice pop in the fridge at the second pool’s poolside office. Or, at least I thought it was him who left it there, and that it was me he left it for. Either way, I just had a feeling that he was a gentleman. Why else would he give up his properties for public use?
Do you think he wears glasses? I texted him as I leaned out from the office window to face the pool, the empty plastic casing of my ice pop dangling from my mouth. That was as far out as I could go from the office without losing internet on my phone. I hope not, he replied when I got to the third pool, takes away his edge. What edge? I thought. Granduncle Tan was a docile and taciturn man in my mind. I decided that he would have glasses.
We did that for the whole summer, tossing at each other specific traits we found fitting for the Granduncle Tan in our minds, building details on top of details until we forgot that we had no idea what Granduncle Tan actually looked like, or whether our speculations were even close to the truth. I found myself observing the men I would see on the streets, even the women sometimes, to look for inspirations that I could slap onto the impression we were constructing. A hook nose. Big, round ears. Long, flouncy arms. The list went on. We decided that we had to both agree on a trait in order for it to be incorporated into our imagination of Granduncle Tan. That way, there wouldn’t be two of Granduncle Tan’s running around in our subconsciousness. Three, if you counted the real Granduncle Tan.
No, he cannot have a goatee, I texted him angrily one night, as if we were Granduncle Tan’s stylists, only directors have goatees, or artists. He replied, after typing then stopping for a few minutes, any man who can grow facial hair can have a goatee, unless Granduncle Tan is hairless, all-over like a boiled egg.
We settled on a pencil mustache.
I asked my mother a couple of times what Granduncle Tan looked like, but she would always reply with something useless, like, “he has a bald spot.” I never pressed for more information or asked to see any photos. I guess part of me enjoyed the mystery, and it was really fun making up fake details with him in our shared imaginary space. I sometimes wondered if we had the exact same image imprinted in our minds: Granduncle Tan, short and plump like one of those smiling buddha statues, with eyes slanted slightly downwards and eyebrows wispy but long, hanging on the two sides of his face. You know what’s funny, I texted him one night, even if he was ever at the pool, I wasn’t able to recognize him. I tried recalling all the faces I saw throughout the day, but I couldn’t pinpoint any reoccurring ones that could possibly be Granduncle Tan. Maybe he’s one of those wrinkly old men who swim in the mornings, he speculated. Maybe, I thought, but why wouldn’t he come and talk to me? If that really was him.
On days that rained, especially when a typhoon would hit and it would rain for days on end, I would still go to every pool because Granduncle Tan needed somebody to check if the ceilings of his poolside offices were leaking and, if they were, to put a bucket where the rain was dripping. Those days, I’d repeat the same route, going from pool to pool the same way I did on clear days. I could have just hopped from one place to another after checking the ceilings of each site, but I always stayed in each of his office for the same amount time I would have spent cleaning the pool outside. I didn’t want to break the routine I had. Besides, I had nothing else better to do. I would try to read the novels I borrowed from the public library — I was desperate to improve my broken English before moving to America — but most of the time I would just go through Granduncle Tan’s recycle bin and sort out the tin cans, ripping off the pop tabs for him to donate to the Ronald McDonald House.
We texted more whenever it rained. It’s scary, I’d write, the rain sounds like firecrackers from here. It did. Rain in the summer fell from the sky in sheets, and the pitter-patter of heavy raindrops always sounded louder than usual from the office, since the rooftop tiles were made of cheap plastic. It was deafening in a soothing yet crushing way. All-encompassing, like the applause from a concert hall. He’d text back with something silly, like, does it come with red envelopes? and ask me how many cans I had gone through. Sixteen, but only one of them has a colored pop tab, I’d reply. I saved all the colored pop tabs for him. Blue, red, green and so on, and I put them all in the front pocket of my backpack.
It was raining very hard on the day I saw him. That was the only time we saw each other that summer, and it was also the last time I ever saw him again. It was two weeks before I left for Cupertino. School had already started for him, and I went back to my junior high school to pay farewell to our class. I didn’t actually want to see him that day. We had conversed so much virtually that summer that I actually felt shy about the idea of seeing him in real life. I arrived around the time school had just ended for them, and my old classmates were coming out of the musty classroom, slowly making their way out of school. They were in Second Year now, which meant that they had relocated to the building across from where we were in First Year.
He had grown two inches that summer. His hair was longer and parted to the side. I had gotten tanner from being under the sun for so long, and I’d put on some muscles on my biceps from all the skimming. When we saw each other, we barely talked. We were swarm by our group of friends, who took turns hugging me goodbye, making me promise that I’d keep in touch. Of course I would, I told them, and I meant it at the time. I guess he was also intimidated by the idea of seeing each other in actuality, since he hung to the back of the crowd the entire time, completely different from his eager persona online. When it was his turn to say goodbye, I handed him the pop tabs I’d collected and saved in a little glass jar, and he gave me a stack of his test papers that were filled with the doodles he claimed to have made. He had gotten zero-mark on all of those tests, but, he was right, he was a good artist. After we exchanged gifts, I gave him a loose hug, which sent a ripple of oohs and ahhs from our friends that were gathered around us. I felt so humiliated that I quickly left not soon after, and that was that.
Two weeks later, I left Taipei. I stayed with a relative in Fremont for a couple of weeks before I was driven to and dropped off at the boarding school my parents had enrolled me in in Cupertino. I didn’t feel remorseful when I left Taipei, since I assumed I’d visit often. But I was wrong. As soon as my new life started in my new school, it was as if my life back home had been wiped clean. I didn’t necessarily mean for it to be that way, but I basically became a brand-new person. I adjusted fairly quickly, finding a group of friends there who had also moved from Taiwan to America. We sometimes talked about life back home, but our connections were mostly based on the fact that we all desperately wanted to fit in. So, we pushed each other to go to school events, join student clubs, and speak in the American dialect. Within a year, I found myself in the school’s literary club, a community I felt a strong kinship with. I spent most of my time writing, publishing the school’s literary journal. Eventually, I graduated from high school and moved to Boston to study Journalism. It was as if I had never even left.
I went back home twice between my move to Cupertino and my college graduation. The first time was for my niece’s wedding, which was a mistake, since I basically slept through her reception due to fatigue from jetlag. I didn’t go back for any of my cousin’s subsequent weddings as a result, but I’d always receive their wedding invitation anyway, and I’d pin it on my refrigerator as if I was considering going. My family sent me photos and postcards throughout the years, always keeping in very close contact. My brother’s graduations, my father’s retirement trips, my mother’s herb garden on our rooftop. I never felt like I was missing out. I would send them photos of myself in return: the road trips I took with my friends, my first dog, the new house I moved into with my boyfriend.
The second time I went back home was for Granduncle Tan’s funeral. When he passed away the year I graduated from college, I flew back immediately for his memorial service. I don’t know what came to me, I hadn’t heard from him since working for him that summer, but I knew I wanted to go back. I remember the room was flooded with the smell of incense, so much so that it was difficult to breathe. My flats were too loose that they flopped whenever I walked, and my eyes itched from all the pollen. My mother sat next to me at the service, weeping quietly into her handkerchief. All eight of his children were there.
That was the first and only time I’d ever seen Granduncle Tan. He had some kind of lung disease that constricted his ability to breathe, so he basically suffocated slowly to death. When I saw him in the casket, he looked frail as a dried leaf, his skin was white as chalk despite the heavy makeup. I was quite disappointed, really, because he looked nothing like what I had imagined.
I always felt guilty for never reaching out to Granduncle Tan while he was alive. I had spent so much time that summer wondering what he was like, but never once did I actually tried to get to know him. Why he built those pools, what he did for a living, I still had no clue. I thought back to the times when I would toy with the idea of Granduncle Tan being the leader of a notorious gang or the conductor of a renowned symphony band. It never seemed to bother me back then that I didn’t know the answers. The same goes for many other people I met in the early years of my youth. They would come and go, yet I never felt the need to hold onto them, even if I had wanted to. Life passed by quietly and I took in whatever was happening to me without dwelling on any moments for too long, the realization only came in hindsight. I guess I always assumed that I still had time.
I thought about him at the funeral. Contemplated texting him about Granduncle Tan’s death, but I was too afraid that he had already forgotten about me. We lost contact not soon after I left. He texted me once, the year we were going into high school, telling me that he had placed into one of the top schools in Taiwan. Those math classes really paid off, I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t, and our conversation petered out not soon after. We were leading completely different lives at that point.
I would sometimes catch myself thinking about him, more and more so now that many years have passed. Does he remember me? I would wonder selfishly, then, to make myself feel better, add, I hope he’s happy. I would be doing something unimportant, like washing the dishes or driving in my neighborhood, and a conversation we had that summer would suddenly surface to my mind. Look into the distance, he used to text me when I told him about the motion sickness I got from the bus rides, and I would do as he said. The bus I took followed a canal that ran a shallow, soapy stream, evergreen from the sewage disposed by neighboring houses, and there was a row of cherry blossoms planted by its sidewalk. The leaves of the cherry blossoms would always cast splattering shadows onto the concrete, running along the bus like the silhouette animation film they used to make us watch in school. That was something I remember noticing at the time, and I would try to recall the name of the silhouette animation film, what it was about, and why we were watching it. At that point, my head would cease to spin, and I would remind myself to tell him about it later.
There were a few times when I came close to texting him. My phone would be in my hand and his name would be displayed on the blinking screen, all the answers to my questions one button away. But I never went through with it. Not once. No matter how much I wanted to, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
