Eight-week summer program

The Eight-week summer program is the eight-week trip to Taiwan arranged by Ever’s parents, beginning almost immediately after they tell her about it. More than a cultural excursion, it places Ever’s distance from her Chinese heritage beside the sacrifices her immigrant family has made, making the summer a test of what belonging and filial responsibility mean to her.

The Program’s Sudden Announcement

Ever’s parents explain that they have enrolled her in a program in Taiwan because they believe it is time for her to learn her culture. Her mother says the eight-week program starts that very weekend, turning what might have been a future family trip into an abrupt departure. Her father presents learning traditional characters as a practical opportunity, but Ever barely understands what he means and protests that she cannot leave for even a week.

The timing sharpens the sense that the decision is not hers: the trip begins on Sunday, with almost no interval between the announcement and departure. Ever’s parents have long talked about visiting Fujian, in southeast China, where they were born and met in college; they left after her father finished medical school. The family has never had enough money to go, and neither parent has living parents there to draw them back. Taiwan is therefore not simply the ancestral visit Ever imagined. She knows it as an island off Fujian’s coast and as the birthplace of an uncle, but it feels so unfamiliar that she compares the prospect to a journey to the moon.

Crossing Into an Unfamiliar Place

At the airport in Taiwan, Ever encounters a world in which Chinese characters and English share public space and Mandarin announcements fill the terminal. She has come from an English-speaking home, where her parents sometimes use Mandarin to keep secrets. Her Chinese-school experience has given her only a few basic phrases, and she has assumed that knowing the names of dim sum dishes might be enough. The airport makes the gap between family identity and everyday fluency tangible: the program sends her into the culture she is supposed to learn before she feels equipped to navigate it.

Her father’s farewell ritual carries another part of the family’s history across the distance. At the Cleveland airport, he takes her arm and tells her, “Safe travels.” The phrase recalls family stories of a great-uncle who went to Germany and never returned and a niece lost at sea; the ritual is meant to ward off misfortune. Ever has previously been the one saying it to her father when he travels, but this time she pulls her arm away and walks through security. The reversal leaves her facing the same anxious possibility that the custom is meant to contain: that someone might not come home.

Separation and Family Obligations

The eight weeks mean separation from the people and routines that define Ever’s life in Ohio. While trying to get through the airport, she thinks of her seven-year-old sister, Pearl, 7,627 miles away, and of Megan dancing in Public Square with Cindy Sanders, who is taking Ever’s place in the parade. She also tries not to think about Dan. These specific absences make the trip more than a change of scenery: leaving for the program means surrendering, at least temporarily, her place in several relationships and in the public performance she had expected to share with her friend.

The family’s transnational ties also complicate the distinction between hardship and privilege. Later, Ever learns that a young woman’s father is an executive at the Bank of China Hong Kong, and that the cost of an international ticket is not a barrier for her. Ever’s immediate comparison is with her own family’s sacrifices, including her mother selling her necklace to send her to Taiwan to learn their culture. The program thus sits within a broader web of money, migration, and kinship rather than serving as a uniform experience for every young person connected to it.

Retrospective Meaning

As the summer unfolds, the trip’s cultural purpose becomes inseparable from Ever’s understanding of what her parents have endured. She describes her father’s childhood poverty: he had no shoes until he was nine, and his mother stretched noodles with scraps of meat because the family could afford little. After he immigrated to America, he admired its paved roads because he had known only dirt roads. When Ever was young, he ate meat she spat out because he could not bear to waste its protein. Those memories give the parents’ decision to send her to Taiwan a material history; the program is connected to their hopes for the daughter whose opportunities differ from their own.

Ever also connects the trip to the pressures surrounding her future. Her parents have faced immigration officers and financial strain, and her mother sold a necklace to make the cultural program possible. Ever recognizes that disappointing them feels, to her, like rejecting the sacrifices behind that gift. When she considers a life in dance instead of medicine, even wanting that choice feels like betrayal. The eight-week program therefore acquires a significance beyond its stated lessons: it brings Ever closer to the family history she has felt distant from, even as that history intensifies her struggle to choose a future for herself.