Mei-Hwa Pan

Mei-Hwa Pan is a Taiwanese Aboriginal counselor at Chien Tan whose open friendliness first offers Ever Wong a point of connection, while her later encounters with the students and a racist tourist reveal the unequal expectations placed on her. Though she is not a central viewpoint character, her scenes give the novel a vivid, embodied presence for Taiwan’s Indigenous people and make respect more than an abstract question of identity.

Identity and Introduction

Li-Han introduces her as a girl counselor, and her name is also given in the reversed form Pan Mei-Hwa. She joins the arriving students in a yellow Chien Tan shirt and a red skirt striped with yellow, green, and black. Her long black hair is tied in a heavy braid with a green ribbon; her rounded features, Ever observes, do not look quite Chinese. The description registers Ever’s uncertainty about how appearance maps onto identity, while Mei-Hwa’s confident, native-speaker Mandarin immediately marks her as at home in the language.

Mei-Hwa welcomes the students with both hands and a smile so open that Ever nearly asks her to explain what she has been brought into. That moment makes her, for Ever, more than a staff member: she seems like a possible source of orientation in an unfamiliar place. The welcome is quickly folded into the practical work of the camp, however. When another girl pushes a bag into her arms, Mei-Hwa blinks and follows the student upstairs, already absorbing the demands of her role.

Counselor Among the Students

The difference between Mei-Hwa’s youth and her authority is part of Ever’s impression of her. Later, Ever sees her at a table with Li-Han and other counselors, playing mah-jong with ivory tiles. Mei-Hwa slams down three tiles and declares a win; she then flexes tiny muscle-man arms and dances sassily in her chair. The scene makes the counselor seem close in age and temperament to the students rather than remote from them, even as she occupies the position of someone charged with supervising them.

That boundary becomes visible when Ever and her companions slip out of Chien Tan. In the moonlight, Mei-Hwa runs after them with Li-Han, her Aboriginal skirt muted by the darkness. Sophie calls for the group to run, and the students hail a cab to Club Babe. Ever laughs with the others but feels guilty, thinking Mei-Hwa looks as though she would rather join them than chase them. The impression is not proof of what Mei-Hwa wants; it is Ever’s sympathetic reading of a young counselor caught between the students’ appetite for freedom and her responsibility to pursue them.

Indigenous Identity and Respect

Ever learns that Mei-Hwa is Taiwanese Aboriginal, with parents from the Plains and Puyama tribes. She understands these communities as Indigenous peoples who have lived on the island for generations. The revelation complicates the surface resemblance that first unsettles Ever: shared East Asian appearance does not make Taiwanese identity singular, and Mei-Hwa’s particular heritage is not reducible to the cultural assumptions Ever brings with her.

That difference becomes urgent during a meal in a rural part of Taiwan. After a tourist complains loudly that the locals cannot speak English properly, the color leaves Mei-Hwa’s cheeks and conversation in the room stops. Ever recognizes the tone as one she has encountered before in racist treatment of her own parents. Her first impulse is to pretend the insult did not happen, as she has often done to avoid drawing attention to disrespect. Instead, she sets down her plate and walks toward the tourists. Mei-Hwa’s visible hurt is the immediate circumstance that turns Ever’s familiar instinct to keep quiet into an occasion for action.

Narrative Significance

Mei-Hwa’s characterization is built through sharp, ordinary details rather than an extended account of her private life: the braid and ribbon at her introduction, the ivory mah-jong tiles, the joking dance, and the skirt in the moonlit pursuit. Together, these details keep her from serving merely as a cultural emblem. She is friendly and playful, but also a working counselor whose duties put her in the position of chasing students who may see the rules as obstacles.

Her scenes also expose how identity and power shift with context. At Chien Tan, she welcomes American-born Chinese students into a place they are still trying to understand; outside the camp, a tourist treats local people as deficient for not speaking English. Ever’s response links Mei-Hwa’s humiliation to the racism directed at Ever’s immigrant parents without suggesting their experiences are identical. Mei-Hwa’s brief presence therefore helps redirect Ever from passive recognition of prejudice toward a public defense of someone else’s dignity.