My trips to Taiwan have always begun the same way:  with an arrival at Taoyuan airport after dark (too late to take the last MRT into the city), followed by a forty minute cab ride that is then the only way to get into the city.  Stepping into my taxi at the beginning what was now my fourth trip to Taiwan, I was naturally reminded of my first cab ride into Taipei, my excitement at having a real live Chinese speaker to talk to, and my utter failure to do so.  At the time I was surprised – I had, after all, been copying Chinese characters over and over for a hour before bed for the past year, and I could already have simple conversations with my friends in China using WeChat.  That my not having bothered learning how to pronounce any of these characters might have implications on my ability to converse simply didn’t occur to me*.

That first trip was in January 2016.  Five months later I was back, and this time I was sure I would be ready.  Instead of just copying characters while drinking wine before bed, I was now copying them and listening to audio files of the associated sound.  I was mostly aware of how to pronounce pinyin correctly (the exception was the “c” sound) and I had even learnt how to sing 月亮代表我的心.  Landing again at Taoyuan airport, I hurried through immigration and marched purposefully to the taxi stand, determined to make up for my past failure – only to discover that I was no more able to communicate with my taxi cab driver than I had been five months previously.  For the next two weeks I hitchiked in a loop around the island with my friend Memory whom I had met on my previous trip. While I was able to impress a few of the people who gave us rides by serenading them with the 鄧麗君 songs I had memorized, I was more or less totally unable to understand a word of the conversations between Memory and our various hosts.

After my second failure, I decided it was time to get serious.  Studying Chinese alone while drinking wine clearly wasn’t working – it was time to get a teacher.  Returning to Vancouver in early July 2016, within a week I had found 傅老師.  傅老師 said that while I knew an impressive number of characters, my pronunciation was terrible and my listening skills non-existent, and so I would have to start from nothing.  Over the next two months I met her three times a week, and by the time I had to go back to Cambridge in early September we had completed “輕鬆學中文 第一課本 (Easy Steps to Chinese – book 1)”.

After I left Vancouver, my lessons with 傅老師 stopped.  However, it was just as well as I no longer had much time for Chinese classes.  The War Against the PhD had entered it’s final, desperate phase, and I needed to devote every resource at my disposal to the fight to the death that lay ahead of me.   However, I hadn’t given up on Chinese, rather by this point I had already resolved that once the PhD had been defeated, I would simply move to Taiwan and live there for as long as it took to learn to speak Chinese.  In October 2017, after an exhausting, six month long war of attrition, the PhD was defeated at last. Stepping over the body of my fallen enemy, I hopped on the first plane to Thailand, where I briefly regrouped before continuing on to Taiwan (for what was then the third visit). When I attempted and failed for the third time to engage my taxi cab driver in conversation in October 2017, I wasn’t particularly bothered.  This time I was coming to Taiwan to live.

Returning to Taiwan for the fourth time in June 2019 – having lived in Taiwan for six months before returning to Canada for a year – I succeeded for the first time in talking to the taxi cab driver who drove me into the city. I had had some fears that my Chinese might have regressed over the past year in Canada – instead I found that it was without a doubt better than when I had left (I had been doing 7 hours of lessons a week online, which appeared to have made up for my being in a non-Chinese speaking country). In fact, I chatted with my taxi driver with an effortlessness that I discovered (and this was deeply disconcerting) contained within it a tiny hint of boredom.  Not full on boredom by any means, just tiniest of undercurrents.  This was nonetheless highly unsettling.

When I lived in Taiwan the previous year, talking to the locals had gradually transformed from something which was impossible to something that I could just do if I tried very very hard.  Moreover, it was in that first taste of victory – when there first appeared a chink in the armor of the erstwhile unassailable Chinese – that I felt the greatest thrill.  Formerly boring chores such as buying pillows became an adventure in trying to be understood.  Small talk became a titanic battle in which – if I concentrated with all my might – I could just barely comprehend the meaning of the barriage of strange sounds my partner in conversation had sent hurtling my way in time to be ready for the next bombardment.  Successfully ordering bubble tea took two weeks of trying separated by meetings with my tutors to discuss the reasons for my previous failures (“ok, it sounds like you got through the part about what sugar level you want this time.  The sounds you heard next were probably them asking you about what size of ice chunks you would like.”) and repeated practice drills.

On this trip, I discovered that the thrill had died down somewhat, and it occurred to me for the first time that if my language skills continued to improve, one day it would evaporate completely. Buying pillows would once again, just be buying pillows. Small talk would become as uninteresting as it was in English. A horrifying thought occurred to me:  could it be that, just as I had lost interest in running the day I ran my first marathon (if memory serves, I didn’t run for two years afterwards) – just as my interest in math dropped precipituously the moment I was admitted into a PhD program in Math at Cambridge University – would I lose interest in Chinese once I mastered it? Was I cursed to the single-minded pursuit of serial obsessions, only to lose interest in them the moment I felt that I had “conquered” them? As I pondered this, I wondered what time of psychological condition underlay this kind of behaviour.

I thought of my friends Leo, Maria, and Alyson, all of whom had been born in Chinese speaking countries and had moved to Canada between the ages of 10 and 18. Had they experienced a similar thrill upon first being able to communicate in English? If so, how long had it taken to disappear? Or, had the situation been completely different, because they had been forced to learn English in order to survive, whereas I was learning Chinese entirely for the sake of interest?

Stepping out of my cab, I thanked the driver and walked over to bubble tea stand I had spotted next to my hotel. Explaining to the clerk that “no, I do not collect points” and “ordinary sized ice chunks are fine thanks”, I was once again reminded of the extreme difficulty of ordering bubble tea during my first few months living in Taipei the previous year.  Conflicting emotions swirled through me once again – pride at my success mixed with apprehension at the subtle but unmistakeable undercurrent of boredom; swirling together like a black yin and a white yang.

*to be fair, it’s not the case that I had no idea at all about how any of these characters sounded.  Typing in Chinese is typically done based on pinyin input, which means that in order to chat on WeChat I needed to know the pinyin of the characters I was typing (pinyin is a system for “spelling” Chinese words using the roman alphabet).  However, knowing how a character is “spelt” in pinyin is not enough to know how to pronounce it correctly, and being able to read a sentence isn’t the same thing as being able to understand it when it is spoken to you at the natural speed of a native speaker.  I had failed to appreciate both of these things.