Taoyuan International Airport

Taoyuan International Airport is Ever Wong’s first encounter with Taiwan in person: a glittering, crowded threshold where the cultural connection her parents hope she will learn feels, at first, like disorientation. After a twenty-one-hour journey, she arrives exhausted and anxious, carrying the expectations of her immigrant family alongside a welcome packet and little confidence in her Mandarin.

Arrival and First Impressions

Ever reaches the airport after twenty-one hours of connecting flights, stepping down a metal ramp with her head still ringing from the jets and her stomach unsettled by the flight’s foil-wrapped teriyaki chicken. The airport’s bright white tiles reflect the stream of passengers; perfume and body odor mingle in the crush as she is carried past Swatch and Dior shops, pineapple-cake displays, and a counter selling black-lacquered bento boxes. The sensory abundance is less a reassuring welcome than a reminder that she is far from Ohio and unsure how to move through this place.

The crowd and commercial details sharpen her sense of being a stranger. She catches sight of her dark-haired, small, frightened-looking reflection in a shop mirror, then pulls out her crumpled welcome packet to find the name of her contact, Chen Li-Han. She expects him to be waiting outside baggage claim, but first has to navigate the airport in one piece.

Language and Cultural Distance

The route through the airport brings Ever past billboards featuring Asian models and into immigration, where Chinese characters share space with English and Mandarin announcements fill the hall. The contrast exposes the gap between ancestry and lived familiarity: at home, the family speaks English, while Ever’s parents use Mandarin to keep secrets. Her Chinese Church vocabulary amounts largely to phrases such as “Let us pray” and “Please sit,” plus the names of dim sum dishes. She hopes those fragments will suffice, though the repeated hope reveals how little she trusts them to.

At the immigration booth, an officer addresses her in Mandarin. Ever apologizes and says she does not speak the language, handing over her American passport; he takes her photograph, scans her index fingers, returns the passport, and waves her through. The procedure gets her across the first barrier without resolving the larger problem: she has arrived in a place her parents call part of her culture, but cannot yet speak its language.

Family History and the Journey

The airport arrival follows a family decision shaped by migration, money, and inherited memory. Ever’s parents were born in Fujian, in southeast China, and met there in college; they left after her father finished medical school. They had talked about taking the family to visit, but could not afford the trip, and Ever’s grandparents had died before she could know them. Taiwan, where her maternal uncle Johnny was born, is therefore not the ancestral visit Ever had imagined. Her parents have instead arranged for her to learn about her culture through a program there.

At Cleveland airport, Ever’s father performs the family ritual of telling her “Safe travels,” a custom connected to stories of relatives lost on journeys: a great-uncle who went to Germany and never returned, and a niece lost at sea. Ever pulls her arm away and goes through security, resisting the immigrant family’s fear that distance might bring catastrophe. In Taipei, that inherited anxiety returns in a new form: after reaching the luggage carousel and hauling free her father’s enormous suitcase, she wonders whether she might get lost and be unable to return.

The Airport as a Threshold

Taoyuan International Airport is both a practical passage and a narrative threshold. Ever has just declined her NYU Tisch admission and been sent to Taiwan; now the airport turns that family-imposed change into an immediate encounter with unfamiliar people, language, and surroundings. Her wish to keep a low profile for the eight-week program and avoid speaking to anyone sits uneasily beside the journey’s stated purpose: learning her culture requires her to enter the very world from which she feels estranged.

The arrival also leads to her first encounter with Xavier Yeh. As she struggles with her suitcase in the arrival hall, a firm hand catches her by the arm before she hits the ground. The airport thus opens the summer not with instant belonging, but with a rescue at the edge of embarrassment—and with Ever still dependent on other people to help her find her footing.