In one of the last conversations I would ever have with my mom, we lamented that we should’ve gone on more trips together. “Sana pala,” I started, trying to keep my voice light and steady, “nag-Taiwan na po tayo nung kaya pa natin.”
It was early 2021, so it went without saying: we should’ve traveled more before last March. But as she agreed and we mustered shaky smiles, she and I both knew that this was an exchange not of wistfulness, but of heartbreak.
She had just gotten diagnosed with stage IV cancer.
When we found out, it was a stupid thought I kept going back to: Would she still be here by Christmas? My birthday? Her birthday? But it turned out that she wouldn’t make it through the month at all.
My mom loved Taiwan. It’s one of the places our family considers second homes, from very long holiday stays with my diplomat aunt—her older sister—who is often stationed for work three years at a time in different cities. I was 13 when I first visited, with no idea what to expect save for what I’d seen on Meteor Garden. It was my first overseas destination, which kind of makes it a first love.
I wouldn’t meet my actual first love until a couple of months later, when the first day of school rolled around.
My aunt lived in a cozy studio that I can still picture in vivid detail after more than a decade. It had a huge window that I would look out of when it’s late, and I never quite found out why, but the skies would be the color of an orange creamsicle even in the middle of the night, when you could hear the garbage trucks make their way through the city with their cheerful little classical songs. Tiny, shiny bottles of apple-flavored milk lined the fridge. Across the street, there was a movie theater, adorned with posters and promotional paraphernalia for Iron Man, Speed Racer, and The X-Files: I Want to Believe. (Can you tell it was the summer of 2008 yet?) We would pass it when we went to get bagels with cream cheese and bread filled with cheese and scallions for breakfast.
But my favorite thing about the apartment was that it had a loft. It was the perfect hideaway when I wanted to read. I would lean against my suitcase and make my way through the books I’d bought at Eslite: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Naomi & Ely’s No Kiss List, How to Say Goodbye in Robot, the very apt French Kissmas installment of the Students Across the Seven Seas series, easily the chicest thing to come out of late 2000s YA along with the Simon Pulse Romantic Comedies. That last Christmas, when ten (!) of us flew in to squeeze into that tiny apartment, three people slept on the king-size bed, one on the couch (that would be me), four on the floor, and three on the surprisingly spacious loft.
I came to see Taiwan as an extension of myself, to the point where I formed my own phantom scent memory of it: Christmas air, fresh coffee, exhaust fumes, and five spice.
We welcomed the New Year—and the new decade—with a spectacular view of the fireworks at Taipei 101 from afar. And when we flew out, I didn’t know I wouldn’t see Taiwan again for 13 years, or that my mom would never get to go back.
Yesterday will be replaced by today and tomorrow
When flights were becoming common again, Taiwan was one of the top places on my priority list for trips. I jumped at the chance as soon as its borders opened, eager to see what it was like now compared to how it had been when I was growing up. I was confident that I could do it solo, but I really wanted to go to Nantou, and it wasn’t easy to get to on your own.
I checked group tour listings every so often, lamenting (whining, really) that they never included any stops in Nantou. My go-to travel agency didn’t have any Taiwan routes available, either. That is, until I checked their website for the millionth time and found that they had opened up slots for a new tour package. It would start in Taichung and include spots like Yehliu Geopark, Shifen Old Street, Ximending, and—I might’ve literally screamed—Sun Moon Lake. Further proof that there’s always merit to being a reklamador.
I initiated a booking immediately. I’d wanted to go in the spring, but the schedules would keep falling through since not enough people were signing up. I had to wait months before everything finally clicked into place and I got to go in June.
I never did get to experience what summer was like in Taipei the first time around.
Taichung
We got in at noon and from the airport we immediately drove to an outlet mall before proceeding to Zhongshe Flower Market. It didn’t feel like a homecoming yet, because this was a city I didn’t really get to explore much during our visits. I was also a little dazed from having been awake since 1 a.m. for the super early flight.
Making our way to the National Taichung Theater, I learned that half of Taichung had this ultra-modern metropolitan feel to it while the other half was more old-world quaint, and the area surrounding us looked almost the way New York does in the movies. The architecture was gorgeous. I loved the blob-like minimalism of the theater’s interiors and wished I could stay longer. I looked through the flyers for upcoming shows, thinking someday I might get to watch something really breathtaking if I ever got a chance to return.
Dinner was at Hosic Teppanyaki, which felt unassuming in that cozy Taiwan way but still very young and upscale inside. I ate my steak at the counter and got to watch all the dishes being prepared. I walked around on the street outside—it was a busy night market-ish area—and my favorite finds of the night were microwavable scallop risotto at a convenience store and sushi being sold out of a cart. I desperately wanted to try both, if only I weren’t too full already.
We checked in at the hotel and finally got some rest. I’d wanted to explore and go on a little walk, maybe even take the bus, but it was late and we had another early morning coming. And I couldn’t wait for said morning to come, because it meant I would be back in Nantou.
Nantou [then]
First: some context on why Nantou means so much to me.
In the Christmas season of 2008, my aunt, cousin, and my aunt’s friends from work rode a bus to Ren’ai, a township on a mountain in Nantou. I was 14 and fully in my broody, moody, angsty teenager era, especially since it would take a couple more years before my cousin and I learned to be kinder to each other.
We walked everywhere huddled in our cozy beanies, mittens, and boots. I applied pear-flavored Kiehl’s Lip Balm #1 and still clung to my colored skinny jeans (again: 2008) even in the winter weather. I wore an adorable patterned purple cable-knit turtleneck sweater made with the thickest yarn, and I’m still pretty much in love with it even if I never saw it again after that trip.
Admittedly, I romanticize Nantou a lot, and not just because it’s breathtaking and I haven’t gotten a chance to relive it exactly as it was in my memories. It’s also because these memories, from a brain that wasn’t even fully-formed and over a decade in the past, are literally all I have left of that trip. The Sony digital camera we used to document it was corrupted, and we never got to save our photos. (Not even the proto-Tumblr photoshoot my cousin and I did on a sprawling field that makes me think of The Sound of Music—or the default Windows XP wallpaper.)
We’ve come to call it our “lost vacation.”
Seven years later, my dad was looking through an old buried backup folder on our ancient desktop (that actually did still have Windows XP with the default wallpaper) and found a series of photos taken on the Samsung digicam I’d gotten that Christmas, completely forgotten. There weren’t many of them, but there they were: the gorgeous chalets at the bed and breakfast next door set against the endless mountains, the view of the trees from our hotel window, the tiny glimpses of Europe at the theme park, families around a fountain in a garden, their bodies blurring from movement. Each image was dreamy and hazy, fading into an everlasting blue, like it really was meant to be lost and found.
Nantou [now]
The next morning, after a quick stop at Wen Wu Temple, we went on a boat ride at Sun Moon Lake. It was cool out there despite the summer heat, and I could’ve easily spent another hour or two on the water, admiring the mountains and breathing in the bright and slightly briny freshness of the water. I loved being able to compare my experiences in the county across the seasons. Whereas Ren’ai had this little Heidi-esque cottagecore thing going for it, Yuchi was very much akin to a seaside town. The street leading to the pier was a busy, sloping market sprawling with laughter and music and unique snacks. And a 7-Eleven, because of course there was.
I got to know some of my travel companions over lunch. We were served Taiwanese seafood dishes on a lazy Susan, which helped make the meal conversational and communal. I grew particularly close to a doctor and her son. He was drag queen, I would learn, and we wound up sharing eye-rolls whenever this one obnoxious person on the tour group would be late for call time or repeatedly say “It’s very giving,” a bastardization of a TikTok phrase I was already never very fond of.
There was also this pair of sisters who had gone on the trip with their mom, who had to be in her late 70s but was still quite sharp and energetic. They asked me what I did for work, and somehow the conversation led to me sharing that I was a columnist for the Philippine Star. The mother asked me to repeat my name, and it turned out that she was the type who really read the paper section by section, cover to cover, and she had seen and even liked my work. It was a very cool and touching moment.
After a longer-than-usual drive to Taipei due to heavy traffic, we had hotpot at TAKAO1972, just across the street from Ximending. The restaurant was huge with really dark, really cool interiors, and their selection of sauces to go with the meat and rice was very good.
We didn’t have much time in Ximending and it was raining, but I enjoyed getting to see it again anyway and found that I still kind of knew its ins and outs. I got souvenirs for my family and for work and tried to find the magazine shop I used to frequent where I bought copies of Teen Vogue. I thought it had closed down and accepted defeat, choosing instead to check out a shop with manga art all over its exterior—only to find out that it was the magazine shop, now also selling comics and collectibles. (It’s called Mag Freak, which I still love.) I got a fun pouch shaped like a big Nissin Seafood Cup Noodle and a Japanese lifestyle and camping magazine. Before the trip I’d been thinking of overpaying for the Re-Ment Snoopy’s Life in a Bottle series online but decided to try and look for them in Taiwan instead, and by chance I found them at the shop without really actively looking. I bought three blind boxes and got the two I really wanted the most, and the third one I gave to my niece. It all made me so happy.
My mental image of it had been a wide-open storefront with plain displays and shelves showcasing magazines all over, fans situated here and there for cooling. But the Mag Freak of a decade later was now air conditioned and had glass partitions. There weren’t a lot of English titles anymore, and it’s bittersweet that there were no longer enough of them to cover the store pretty much wall to wall, but it was so important to me that this part of Taipei, my Taipei, had remained.
Apart from everything but the heart in my chest
Another reason this particular tour package was a must for me: my hotel happened to be a five-minute walk from the loft where my aunt used to live. That night after checking in, I left my room to make my way over to the apartment building whose address I’ll always know by heart: Yitong Street, corner Changchun Road.
It was nearing midnight, so the streets were dark and empty. Nothing was open anymore. I crossed the main road with the bus stop in the middle, passing side streets and places I never thought I’d see again: the local playground, the old tea place we loved just downstairs before bubble tea ever became a big deal in Manila, a small market of dry goods that was now a little Korea of sorts.
The doors to the building were just as I remember. I wondered if the fountain in the lobby still worked, if the security guard we’d come to know as Patrick was still around. If any of the tenants had apple milk bottles in their fridge.
I didn’t stay out too long. Certainly not enough to feel like I was home again. I wish I could’ve known how it felt during the day with people around and everything in full color, but if there’s anything this trip has taught me, it’s that I can always come back.
Feel like a lover out on the ocean
Our first stop the next morning was all about pineapple cakes, with a fun interactive factory tour and a hands-on experience where they had us cover the pineapple filling in dough and shape them with cookie cutters. We made cakes shaped like Taiwan, the classic square shape, and a pineapple. We browsed the souvenir shop while they baked (they had the cutest dessert-inspired characters available as little figures), and they were boxed fresh out of the oven for us to pick up on our way out. I couldn’t resist trying one while it was hot, and it was good enough to make the whole stop worth it, even if it felt a little hokey.
I’ve gotten to see a lot of Taiwan, but I’m glad this trip actually included mostly places I’d never been before. Having ridden mostly trains to get around back then, I noticed how perfectly paved the whole island is for breathtaking road trips thanks to all these long bus drives. Shifen Old Street was charming, if a bit crowded. One of my wishes on the sky lantern didn’t really pan out. Yehliu Geopark was particularly exciting to me, with its gorgeous majestic rock formations set against a body of water that made me feel at peace to breathe in.
We had dinner at Din Tai Fung in Taipei 101. I would joke that I could literally just go to my local mall for it, but it was still nice since I’d never really tried it before. Everything was delicious, of course. There wasn’t time to explore around the area, including the nearby Eslite Bookstore, so after getting back to the hotel I just went on a Family Mart run. I got a cheeseburger onigiri (beef was kind of bland, but still a fun novelty), salted chocolate milk, scallop potato chips (haunts my dreams with how good it was), and some Knorr Soup Deli.
Soon I would simply evaporate
That night I barely got any sleep from sudden health problems that didn’t go away through the next day. I begged off the last few stops of the trip, which were thankfully just the well-trodden (by me and my family) Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and the Presidential Square. I just did my best to keep it together on the flight back to Manila, until I saw my dad again at arrivals and we made our way home.
I had a great time on the trip and I got good pictures and cute souvenirs out of it, but I’d be lying if I said it went exactly as I expected. It made me realize how much of the Taiwan I loved would never have been the same if I hadn’t been there with my family. No mornings sharing cheesy rolled omelettes from downstairs. No long, aimless walks in the early winter/springtime cool that somehow took us farther than we ever imagined. No afternoons cross-legged on the floor waiting for “Bad Romance” to come on Channel V because it had become our song of the season, and no randomly bursting into “Whoa, caught in a bad romance” as we went sightseeing or shopped at Costco or made our way around night markets or dined out. It felt like home to me because I was home.
But it was nice to get to know Taiwan again in a way I’d never really seen before. It wasn’t as cheap (as in cheap thrills), it didn’t feel as much like my best-kept secret anymore. It’s different, but I know I could fall in love with it again. And the next time around, I’ll make sure to truly discover it for once on my own terms.
“Lost Taipei” by Joanna Wang
“Tourist” by Julian Casablancas
“Sentimental Heart” by She & Him
“Love Me or Leave Me” by Rooney
“Seaside” by The Kooks
“Silver Lining” by Rilo Kiley
“Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga
“Now” by Joanna Wang
“At the First Place” by F4
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