Ever’s arrival in Taiwan and first meeting with Rick Woo turn a journey imposed in the name of cultural learning into a collision with family expectations, immigrant memory, and an old personal comparison. After twenty-one hours of connecting flights, she enters Taoyuan International Airport overwhelmed by an unfamiliar language and crowd, then nearly falls outside before Rick catches her. She recognizes him as the boy whose newspaper acclaim has shadowed her since childhood: the prodigy against whom she has been made to feel she never measures up.

Causes and Background

Ever’s parents send her to a program in Taiwan because they believe it is time for her to learn her culture. Their own point of origin is Fujian, where they were born and met in college, but the family has never been able to afford a visit. Her maternal grandparents died before Ever was born and her paternal grandfather died four years later, so family ties do not offer an obvious reason to travel there. Taiwan is correspondingly remote in Ever’s understanding: she knows it is an island off the coast of Fujian and that her uncle Johnny, married to her mother’s sister in Vancouver, was born there.

The trip is also bound up with a choice her parents have already made for her. Ever has declined her New York University Tisch School of the Arts offer, and now leaves for Taiwan rather than beginning the dance education she wanted. Her father presents the program as an opportunity to learn traditional Chinese characters; Ever experiences the departure as part of a life being directed by others. The difference between the parents’ language of opportunity and their daughter’s sense of compulsion gives the arrival its emotional charge.

Arrival in an Unfamiliar Place

After twenty-one hours of connecting flights, Ever reaches Taoyuan International Airport bleary-eyed, with a carry-on on her shoulder and the taste of airplane food still troubling her. The bright floor, dense stream of passengers, perfumes, body odor, shops, food counters, and Mandarin announcements arrive in a rush. She catches sight of herself in a mirror: small, dark-haired, and frightened among strangers. Her welcome packet names Chen Li-Han as her contact, and the ride to Chien Tan should be waiting beyond baggage claim.

The airport also makes her linguistic isolation immediate. At home, the family speaks English, except when her parents use Mandarin to keep secrets. Ever has learned only a few basics at Chinese Church, where prayers and instructions are translated line by line; she knows phrases associated with dim sum, but doubts those fragments will help her manage the airport. Her breath grows fast and shallow as she tries to keep panic at bay. She thinks of Pearl, 7,627 miles away, of Megan dancing in Public Square with Cindy Sanders in her place in the parade, and of Dan, whom she does not let herself think about. She hopes to get through the eight-week program without attracting attention from the Chinese school supervisor or having to speak to anyone.

Her disorientation is sharpened by the contrast with the family ritual at departure. At the Cleveland airport, her father took her arm and said, “Safe travels.” The words belong to family lore about relatives who left and did not return: a great-uncle who went to Germany and never came back, and a niece lost at sea. The ritual works like a precaution against misfortune, but Ever had pulled her arm away and marched through security, resisting the fear that her father might die before she returned. In Taiwan, the question of getting home safely gives that inherited anxiety a new, immediate setting.

The Airport Encounter

Outside the terminal, Ever looks for the Chien Tan pickup amid sunlight, honking horns, and traffic. When she asks a woman holding another sign for help, a stranger grips her shoulder and demands to know where she is going. Ever does not understand him. The encounter becomes frighteningly physical: she cries out and her suitcase is wrenched away. A firm hand catches her by the upper arm just before she hits the ground.

The person who steadies her is Rick Woo. He hauls her upright, rights the suitcase with a thud, and scowls at her for being an hour late while he and the others have been waiting. Ever, stunned and tongue-tied, manages an awkward greeting. Rick has been listening to a Beatles song through an earphone, an unexpectedly familiar fragment for someone she has just encountered in a place that feels wholly foreign. The scene moves her abruptly from near-fall and helplessness into the care—brisk, unsentimental, and physically decisive—of the person assigned to meet her.

Recognizing Rick

During the drive to Chien Tan, Rick’s name and appearance gradually summon a memory. Ever remembers seeing him in the World Journal when she was nine, identified as Woo Guang-Ming, a Chinese boy from New Jersey whose birthday was five days after hers. He had won the national spelling bee while she had not even known there was a contest beyond her fourth-grade silver medal. Her mother’s suggestion that Ever work harder at spelling turned his win into one more measure of her own supposed inadequacy.

The comparison accumulated as both children grew up. At twelve, Rick made his piano debut at Lincoln Center, prompting another parental demand that Ever practice harder. At fourteen, he won the Google Science Fair with a machine-learning algorithm, while Ever was asked how she could go to medical school with a B in biology. Their equal age made his achievements an especially convenient yardstick: in her parents’ telling, he had accomplished several times as much in the same number of years.

Rick’s later recruitment as a Yale running back deepened the contradiction between the public image of the star and Ever’s private resentment. Her parents’ admiration rose again, while hers fell. She also remembers a different World Journal prodigy whose grieving parents commemorated his suicide with a full-page résumé, a memory that complicates the newspaper’s parade of achievement. In Taiwan, the celebrated name is no longer a clipping or an abstract standard. Ever blurts out that she recognizes Rick; he frowns, and she explains nothing, privately understanding him as the yardstick for a life in which she has never felt she measures up.

Significance

The meeting establishes an ironic reversal in Ever’s relationship to the achievement stories that have shaped her at home. Rick first appears as the rescuer who stops her fall, but he is also the living embodiment of the comparison that has helped make her feel inadequate. His controlled, almost graceful presence reinforces the impression of someone who has never made a wrong step; beside him, Ever remembers herself as the person always being told to do more and do better.

At the same time, the encounter places Ever’s cultural displacement within a specific family history rather than reducing it to unfamiliar surroundings. She is sent to Taiwan in order to learn a culture her parents associate with their origins, yet she arrives with little language, uncertain knowledge, and a hope of remaining unnoticed. The airport pickup brings that gap into contact with Rick, whose success has already been woven into her family’s expectations. Their first meeting therefore begins both a relationship in the present and an encounter with the old standard against which Ever has learned to judge herself.