The National Palace Museum gives Ever a dense encounter with Chinese material culture and the unsettled history of how it came to Taiwan. In its rain-soaked approach and crowded galleries, treasures become more than things to look at: they invite questions of inheritance, displacement, and intimacy, while Xavier’s presence makes the visit a turning point in their strained relationship.

Setting and Arrival

On a Friday afternoon, Ever and the other students travel by luxury bus to the National Palace Museum. Warm rain falls over a gate of five white arches capped with sea-green roofs; beyond it, a broad flagstone avenue runs between thick-leaved trees toward a sprawling beige palace nestled against a mountain. Five matching sea-green-and-orange pagodas rise at the museum’s center and along its sides. The imposing approach presents the museum as both a destination and a repository of history.

The journey there is also shaped by the group’s behavior. In the rain, Ever and Laura encounter Sam and David on their hands and knees while Peter and Marc climb onto them to form a human pyramid for a photograph. Ever knows David has one of her nude pictures, but chooses to act as though she does not remember. The museum visit therefore begins amid the social tensions she carries into its galleries, rather than apart from them.

Collections and Contested History

Ever tries to immerse herself in the museum’s treasures, which she describes as having been liberated—or stolen—by the Kuomintang, depending on one’s position in history. The qualification refuses to treat the collection’s presence in Taiwan as politically neutral. The works draw her toward Chinese cultural inheritance even as their displacement raises the question of who has the right to claim and preserve it.

Among the objects she sees is a famous Chinese cabbage carved from a single piece of white-and-green jade. Ever visits it with Laura and several other girls after avoiding Xavier’s group near a Mongolian yurt. A museum lesson explains how light shining through jade helps distinguish it from ordinary rock. The encounter makes the collection’s artistry tangible: a change in material, revealed by light, is the difference between a stone and a treasured carving.

The galleries also hold carved ivory globes nested inside one another and nuts and olive stones worked into animals, boats, and demon masks. Later, Ever is pressed by a crowd toward a glass case containing a cinnamon-brown slice of pork belly on a gold platter. Its glistening fat and layered meat look edible, but the astonishing object is carved from jasper. Xavier teases her that this is the one stone she absolutely had to see in Taipei. The museum’s concentrated artistry repeatedly unsettles the boundary between natural material and human representation.

Memory, Food, and Distance

At lunch, familiar foods connect the visit to Ever’s family life in Ohio. She finds freshly pulped watermelon juice, passion-fruit halves served with tiny plastic spoons, and a purple dragon fruit like her mother’s favorite. The fruit differs from the white, desiccated versions sold at the Chinese grocery in Cleveland. Holding the heavy fruit makes Ever uneasy, and she puts it back. Cultural recognition here is not simply comfort: an object can make home feel vivid while also exposing the distance between the place she came from and the place she is visiting.

The museum’s works similarly pull Ever between attraction and estrangement. She tries to focus on the collection, but its history cannot be separated from competing accounts of possession, and its objects carry associations beyond their display cases. A jade statue of a boy embracing a bear makes her think of Rick and wonder whether anything has changed in his relationship with Jenna. The visit gives her no answer; instead, the art becomes a screen for uncertainty about the life continuing beyond the museum.

Xavier and the Visit’s Emotional Turn

Near the jasper carving, Xavier moves beside Ever and takes her by the elbow to protect her from the crowd as they leave the crush around the case. His nose is still bruised, with a dark-yellow patch across its bridge. His touch and scent bring back the memory of their kisses and of their bodies interlocked, joining the museum’s present encounter to their recent intimacy.

In another gallery, a guest artist’s chisel taps against stone while a silk scroll depicts Mount Lu, its craggy peaks and evergreens rendered in deep blues. Xavier comes up beside Ever and places his hand over hers on the railing. He asks whether he would have had a better chance with her if he could read. Ever rejects the premise, then recognizes that she had run away the morning after and avoided him because she was mortified to own her choice. The museum’s significance in their relationship lies not in resolving the past but in making her see her own part in the distance between them.